Part of the Presteigne festival's appeal is that it is both in the middle of nowhere and somewhere special in its own right. Its focus on contemporary music gives it identity, and the fact that returning composers forge links with their audience creates an ever stronger context for first performances.

Yet few pieces can have had such a particular resonance as the two new song-cycles in which John McCabe and Cecilia McDowall set sequences of poems by Jo Shapcott and Simon Mundy respectively. The sense was of words being deeply rooted in this part of Radnorshire, but also embracing an unselfconscious universality. Shapcott's Gladestry Quatrains offered 11 intimate pictures, miniature in proportion, but artfully conceived by McCabe for soprano and piano so as to build aural images and moods: the piano's wild gusts and then its pounding chords for the black clouds at Burl Hill and Newchurch carried the vocal line with a dark passion.

The combination of aerial perspective with historical in Mundy's five poems meant that McDowall's Radnor Songs took on a broader span, with swooping curves to match the flight of the all-seeng buzzard, and stark outlines of thematic material etched as sharply as the Iron Age remains that define the landscape. Thanks to the poets reading their words by way of preface and the conviction of Rachel Nicholls and Paul Plummer's performances, each cycle complemented the other well.

Ulster's Ian Wilson was Presteigne's composer-in-residence this year. The spare, ascetic quality of the cello's voice in his piece Six Days at Jericho made its own mark. As importantly, it cleared a path for the transcendent beauty of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, movingly played by Katharine Gowers, Catriona Scott, Thomas Carroll and Gretel Dowdeswell.