Harrison Birtwistle, John Woolrich, Schumann, Schubert and Bach were among the featured composers at Aldeburgh this year. Peter Wispelwey played the Bach cello suites at Snape Maltings on a baroque instrument. The tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Antonio Pappano gave Schubert’s Schwanengesang there: a fiercely impassioned recital in which Bostridge, for all his crystalline diction, seemed to turn the composer into a half-crazed expressionist, a desperate melancholic. The Philharmonia Orchestra’s Snape concert, under Oliver Knussen, began robustly and open-heartedly with Schumann’s Konzertstück for four horns, but soon moved into the introversion of Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird, a 12-minute piece derived from a fragment of song by that Elizabethan melancholic John Dowland.

The work is a kind of undeclared tone poem, written as a pendant to his larger-scale orchestral The Shadow of Night, and beginning and ending with material from that score. There is a haunting, lilting mellowness to the shorter piece, and a transparency in the way it superimposes structural layers, as well as the solid reference point of actual birdsong mimicry, that makes it easy to follow, and, indeed, an ideal introduction to Birtwistle’s world. The concert not only suggested this much, but, by following the Birtwistle with Frank Bridge’s comparably compact and mellow (and harp-inflected) Shakespearian “impression”, There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook, teasingly linked him to the native pastoral tradition to which he is generally considered to be starkly opposed. With all his wild dissonances, though, he has ever been a son of the soil.

John Woolrich, the festival’s associate artistic director, is a composer in a Birtwistle mould, though that is, by definition, a feistily individualistic thing to be. Like Birtwistle, he is attracted to sharply defined, often spiky and vituperative blocks of material, thrust up against each other in a mode of ritual repetition. His brief, single-movement wind sextet, The Iron Cockerel Sings, played by the

Britten Sinfonia at Aldeburgh parish church, is built in this way, and so is the one-movement (21-minute) Violin Concerto, premiered at Snape by the Northern Sinfonia, under Thomas Zehetmair, with Caroline Widmann as soloist.

What sets Woolrich apart from Birtwistle is his insistent use of figuration in unison or octaves. Far from the latter’s complex vertical textures, Woolrich’s music barely admits counterpoint, and then, one feels, grudgingly. Nor is harmony welcomed with open arms. It is as though he wants to make a piece arise out of the barest gesture, miraculously extended. The concerto, fast-moving, brightly focused, with a sort of lacquered surface and perfectly untroubled about an interior life, sustains a gripping power that is really rather mysterious.

Both the Philharmonia and Northern Sinfonia programmes were interestingly devised — the latter ended with a hard-driven, vibrato-averse, “early music” approach to Schumann’s Symphony No 3 — but that given at Snape by the Arditti Quartet, ending with the British premiere of Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings, was designed by him as an entity in itself. Preparing the ground for his new work were three extracts from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, in glassy, secretive arrangements by Birtwistle, Stravinsky’s terse, hieratic Three Pieces, and John Cage’s String Quartet in 4 Parts, a study in lulling if inconsequential half-tones.

Its culmination was a half-hour movement whose title is that of a Gaelic/English poem by Sorley MacLean, one of many by him that are inspired by his Hebridean birthplace of Raasay, where Birtwistle lived for a decade. Beginning with barely audible, otherworldly flutings and tremolandos, and sounds produced with the stick of the bow, it offers itself as an antenna picking up an island’s subtlest signals. The level soon rises to fortissimo, but the sense of rarefied evocation prevails.

The writing is unmistakably Birtwistle’s, the latest, most supple development of an idiom that says so much with pulsing, block-like ostinato accompaniments and the dramatic contrast of strict group rhythm and untethered solo excursions.

At the end, this principle is taken to an extreme, as the performers separate from each other on the platform, and exit in succession, while still playing. Not so much a Hebridean memory as one of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, but perhaps the symbol of a keen or even bereaved nostalgia.

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