One of the virtues of the Huddersfield contemporary music festival has always been its ability to attract performers and ensembles who otherwise appear rarely in Britain. It's hard to understand why, for instance, we have heard so little of the Swedish percussionist Jonny Axelsson, whose lunchtime recital devoted to Kevin Volans' three solo-percussion pieces was a real triumph of stamina as well as virtuosity and concentration. There is nothing flamboyant or fussy about Axelsson, he just goes about his tasks with dazzling musicianship.
His recital was also a showcase of Volans' imagination, his ability to draw an almost infinite array of patterns and effects from a relatively limited range of unpitched instruments (with a cameo appearance by tuned percussion, a marimba, in one of the pieces). The 1985 She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket is already a bit of a classic. The brief and violent Asanga (1997), however, and the expansive and wonderfully intricate Akrodha (1998) are not so well known, but clearly should be.
Another instrumentalist closely associated with Volans, the pianist Jill Richards, gave the British premiere of his six Etudes in her recital, prefacing them with pieces by Stockhausen, Feldman and Kurtág. They are studies in composition as much as technique, though their dense layering is difficult to bring off in performance. The first three, completed in 2002, concentrate on the rhythmic polyphonic so characteristic of Volans, while the remaining pieces, first performed earlier this year, are more concerned with variations in texture and attack. Whether they work as a 40-minute set I don't know, but Volans' piano writing is constantly enthralling.
Volans' best-known work, his string quartet White Man Sleeps, began the Smith Quartet's second festival appearance, but the novelty in their programme was Tendril, a substantial new quartet from Howard Skempton. It proved to be a wonderfully sustained, 20-minute movement, built out of crawling chromatic figures and canonic techniques that never become repetitious but develop through their own logic - a masterly display of Skempton's utterly natural art.
· The Huddersfield contemporary music festival continues until Sunday. Box office: 01484 430528.
