What distinguishes the Huddersfield contemporary music festival from most of its equivalents across Britain and Europe is its lack of stylistic bias; the minimalists can rub shoulders with the serialists, and the spectralists with the postmodernists, without any of them being made to feel inferior.
The four featured composers for this year's festival are Kevin Volans, Howard Skempton, Rebecca Saunders and Richard Ayres, and there is little common artistic ground between any of them. The British expats Ayres (who lives in Holland) and Saunders (Germany) dominate the final concerts next weekend; the opening few days belong to Volans and Skempton, and both were represented in the first of two recitals this week by the Smith Quartet.
Skempton's Catch was a beautifully fashioned reminder of what a supreme craftsman he is, and how deceptively straightforward and instinctive his music sounds even when, as here, it is constructed with meticulous care. But it was Volans who dominated the programme, which ended with one of the African-inspired pieces from the 1980s that really put him on the international map, String Quartet No 2 - Hunting-Gathering, and also included the world premiere of his Ninth Quartet, subtitled Shiva Dances.
Those African musics and tuning systems were important to Volans as a young composer finding his own voice, but the music of the American postwar experimentalists, and of Morton Feldman in particular, has proved a more lasting influence. The subtle shifts of attack, voicing and colour in the new quartet, a 20-minute piece built out of a handful of chords, draw the listener into the musical fabric in the same way that Feldman's structures hold the attention; Volans patterns the detail microscopically, until the music finally slips away in glassy harmonics. It must be very hard to play accurately, but the Smiths did a wonderful job, as confident in that world as they had been in Skempton's very different one.
· The Huddersfield contemporary music festival continues until Sunday. Box office: 01484 430528.
