The best thing about Presteigne is the silence. This may seem a churlish response to a festival that offers five days of intensive music-making. But the deep quietness of this Welsh border town is the perfect context for concentrated and undistracted listening - and you certainly need to concentrate.

The festival began with a long and demanding programme performed with alacrity by the Presteigne Festival Orchestra conducted by the festival's artistic director, George Vass. Presteigne is loyal to its own particular circle of favoured composers, and this concert showcased the year's first festival premiere and commission: a picturesque suite called Lost Lanes - Shadow Groves, by James Francis Brown. Gently contrasted pastorals were separated by cadenza-like interludes that showed off the solo prowess of the clarinettist Catriona Scott.

The new work was complemented by Bartók's Romanian Folkdances and Rudolf Barshai's arrangement for string orchestra of Shostakovich's Tenth String Quartet. And there were also two woefully overextended works, Peteris Vasks's Viatore and Joe Duddell's Snowblind. Duddell is this year's composer in residence, and his Parallel Lines, a more rigorous and nicely teasing work, was played by the pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips and the percussionist Colin Currie at the end of a thrilling late-night recital by Currie. At the heart of this was a nine-drum thunderstorm of a piece by Per Nørgård called Fire over Water, and Louis Andriessen's Woodpecker for marimba and wood-blocks, played by Currie with exuberant virtuosity.

Michael Berkeley is this year's “featured” composer. His Persistent Memory, an engaging little six-minute musical drama for violin and piano, inspired by a three-note motif in Debussy's Violin Sonata, was played by Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Helen Reid in their enterprising afternoon recital.

But the most substantial concert featured the Dante Quartet, framing the premiere of Matthew Taylor's String Quartet No 5 with some rather rough-hewn Haydn and Janácek. Clearly, all rehearsal time had been spent on the Taylor - justifiably so, for this was an outstandingly imaginative and accomplished single-movement work, travelling from a highly-charged cross-etching of ideas to a mesmeric lullaby in 15 beguiling minutes.

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