Swiss music, or music influenced by Switzerland, is one theme of this year’s City of London Festival. And it’s being pursued with such zeal that a critic can cover the bases only by hurtling between venues on a bike. (At this point I should launch into a diatribe about the disgraceful lack of cycle racks in the Square Mile.)

Thus it was that at 8pm on Monday I was in the splendid Merchant Taylors’ Hall listening to Nigel Short’s choir, Tenebrae, premiering his evocation of the Rhine; at 8.30pm I was admiring the Hottingen Guild Band from Zurich delivering alfresco marches in Napoleonic-era blue uniforms; at 9pm I was in Bridewell Hall witnessing two men doing wacky things with alphorns. Rarely have I felt so in need of a beer.

Tenebrae mostly comprises the usual suspects from the ubiquitous London professional choral mafia. Their Schubert partsongs were exquisite, but their Brahms Neue Liebeslieder Waltzer received only the most generalised colouring. One wondered how much they had been rehearsed. And what happened to Short’s pledge in this newspaper that Tenebrae would sing everything from memory, “because it deepens your interpretation”?

Happily, his own piece, Rhenus Fluvius, made partial amends. Appropriately watery texts by the Swiss poet Jurg Fankhauser were mostly intoned by narrator or sung by basses, while the other singers produced gently overlapping backing harmonies. Holst and Vaughan Williams set folk songs the same way a century ago. But Short’s harmonies were beguiling, and his work expertly tailored.

The atmosphere was livelier down the road, where Christian Zehnder and Balthasar Streiff – the zany young Swiss chaps of Stimmhorn – were mounting the sort of anything-goes entertainment that defies categorisation. Streiff plays alphorns, trumpets, tubas – sometimes simultaneously.

Zehnder squeezes an accordion and sings. Or rather howls. But he also uses an electronic device that splits his voice multiphonically. Their music is bizarre but also strangely intense. It may be yodelling, but it’s angst-ridden. And their patter is in the finest traditions of Swiss humour: utterly deadpan. “This is our rejected theme song for Euro 2008,” Streiff announced. “That’s your view,” Zehnder retorted. “For me, it’s a requiem for a sheep.”

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