Whispers, whistles and wit

It would make a good question for a quiz. "Which leading British composer of the late 20th century espoused the Irish Question in music?" Cornelius Cardew (1936-81) was a figurehead of avant-garde music in England for more than 20 years, gaining early status from studies with Stockhausen, whose assistant he was from 1958 to 1960; notoriety from his involvement with the Scratch Orchestra, a free group of musicians and non-musicians with an active interest in the sometimes zanily experimental; and scorn for his conversion to the Marxist-Leninist ideas of Mao Zedong and what many saw as an artistic retreat into the writing of music for purely political purposes.

Cardew's death, 20 years ago - apparently in suspicious circumstances by a hit-and-run driver - robbed British music of one of its most radical and provocative thinkers. Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival's 20th-anniversary tribute, one of the festival's relatively rare focuses on a composer no longer living, left out the music of politics, concentrating on early works and a "paragraph" from The Great Learning, a seven-hour marathon through which Cardew opened the performance of contemporary music to untrained participants.

The politics of music, of course, was present. Paragraph 6 of The Great Learning was followed by a four-way discussion, which fractured along fascinating lines. The composer Howard Skempton and the pianist John Tilbury, both long-time associates of Cardew, took conflicting ideological sides about Cardew's view of art, offering a sharp reminder of the spuriousness of much of what passes as clear "tradition".

The composer Christopher Fox, a decade or two younger than Skempton and Tilbury, clearly treasures Cardew as a very special presence in the history of avant-garde ideas in Britain. And the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, director of the ensemble Apartment House, younger again, simply loves the music and the freedom it gives to performers, and wants to bring it to as many listeners as he can manage.

Certainly, Apartment House's all-Cardew programme, with Tilbury a masterful balancer of angular dynamics in February Pieces (1959-61), and Lukoszevieze and guitarist Alan Thomas strangely mesmerising in Solo With Accompaniment (1964) - imperturbable, long-held cello notes against agitated guitar flurries - was as persuasive as you could have wished, and culminated in the 1960s-style "happening" of Schooltime Compositions (1968).

There was a period-flavour experimentalism, too, in a programme called Warsaw Then And Now, a re-enactment by the original performers of a programme of 1970s works given at the first Huddersfield festival, in 1978, by the Warsaw Music Workshop, a group long defunct but reassembled for the occasion. The violent reactions triggered in the audience nearly a quarter of a century ago were notable by their absence this year.

Listeners are today clearly free to be amused by iconoclasm, as they were also, in an all-Hungarian programme, by Laszlo Vidovszky's Schroeder's Death, which takes its title from the piano-practising character in Peanuts cartoons. It calls for two assistants to "prepare" a piano, inserting bits and pieces between the strings, while the performer plays moto-perpetuo-style, up and down the keyboard. The notes become not only altered in timbre, but also progressively muted, so that, over 25 minutes, the busy pianist finds his still Herculean efforts gradually dwindling into silence. Silence, interrupted by faint wind sounds and ethereal whistles, is a feature of the music of Italy's Salvatore Sciarrino, featured in a sold-out portrait concert during which the audience held its collective breath. Hardly a sound was to be heard from the listeners as they strove to register every minuscule breath of an art that magnifies the expressive charge of the emergence of sound out of silence the way a microscope does the image of what falls into its focus.

There's violence, too, in Sciarrino's work, like a footfall or a rainstorm intruding upon the perfect miniature of a blade of grass. Mario Caroli's incomparably refined presentation of the strangely disembodied, even deconstructed sounds Sciarrino extracts from the flute was perhaps the most individual contribution to a concert that showed a composer as obsessively and relentlessly focused as Xenakis, though usually at the opposite end of the dynamic spectrum.

Lohengrin, or azione invisible, to use the composer's description of his short opera, is an other-worldly distortion of elements of the familiar story, with such rarefied music - Elsa never sings, the three male clones are hardly given anything to register with - that it offers an experience so evanescent you might well wonder if you've had one at all.

Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski's protracted, slow-motion production with the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin has the musicians onstage, entering horizontally along a slowly curving slatted bench on which they finally settle and from which they perform. The stasis of the production reinforced the impression that this is a work treading perilously close to nothingness.

There was a strong Nordic presence this year, the most interesting component of which was a portrait concert of the Danish composer Bent S°rensen. His is a music that contrives to be made of sounds that have already dissolved. Well-worn chords float by, also lines bent and twisted out of tune, and shimmering flecks and spots no longer traceable to their sources. The Cikada Ensemble, under Christian Eggen, ran together the six poetically titled works of their late-night programme, without a break. Paradoxically, this ploy worked altogether better than the self-conscious From The Grammar Of Dreams, a "visualised concert" of works by Kaija Saariaho, specially costumed and lit, and with newly written links connecting the already-composed works. The Saariaho programme, for all the detail of its staging, became something of a blur; the S°rensen had a stronger sense of being multifaceted.

The idea of revitalising concert presentation by these sorts of means is often put forward as a development that would entice listeners alienated by the formal constraints of the typical classical concert. Contemporary programmers are certainly responding more fully to these urgings than those working in standard repertoire. Another Nordic programme, of work by the Norwegian Rolf Wallin - including a risible piece in which he "played" his body in front of a laptop computer, with heavily wired hands and wearing a special suit littered with patches of electronic sensors - was also given in a specially lit and designed theatrical setting. And Garth Knox gave a one-man show, L'Amour └ Sept Cordes, wrapping a wide range of music into a sometimes witty exploration of the sound worlds of the viola and viola d'amore.

The theatrical tour de force of this year's festival was Heiner Goebbels's Hashirigaki, an embedding of hauntingly repetitive texts by Gertrude Stein for three incantatory singing actresses in a free-association phantasmagoria executed with awe-inspiring precision. The music, heavily dependent on Beach Boys backing tracks, was poppily dilute, and Goebbels's purely musical Scutigeras, played in a separate programme by Piano Circus, suggests that the strengths of Goebbels's divide-crossing work are not in the domain of music.

Works that stood out during the festival included Jahr Lang Ins Ungewisse Hinab, a piece for large ensemble by the Austrian veteran Friedrich Cerha. Inspired by a dream of waves, the piece suggests the wave motion by dense undulations before working through the sparkling flecks of a waterfall and a dark-night-of-the soul climax, then settling into an eerily displaced calm through which floats the sound of a wordless soprano.

Cerha's apparent connection of concept and delivery was impressively taut in Klangforum Wien's fine performance under Sylvain Cambreling; the two younger composers in Klangforum's programme, Johannes Maria Staud and Olga Neuwirth, tended towards an overloaded opacity, the density of the writing sometimes seeming merely to fight against itself.

Alejandro Vi±ao's Borges Y El Espejo, for soprano (Frances Lynch) and electronics, focuses on the deceptive morphing of the singer's ululating cries into a computer-generated world in which the counterpart is the rich timbre of a tam-tam. Vi±ao mined this territory with musical and theatrical acuity.

Gy÷rgy Kurtβg, the most celebrated of Hungarian composers working in Hungary, was present for a 75th-birthday celebration that ranged from some of his earliest works to part of his most recent, ZwiegesprΣch, for string quartet with electronics provided by his son, Gy÷rgy Kurtβg Jr. After a promising start, the electronics degenerated into moody, New Age-style clichΘs that suggested family feeling may have got the better of Kurtβg's critical judgment. There was no hint of concession in Kurtβg's performances, with his wife, Mβrta, of miniatures for piano solo and duet from his JβtΘkok, interspersed with arrangements of Bach. Inspirational is the only word for this duo's work, individually and collectively.

There were two Irish composers represented in this year's programme. Gerald Barry's Au Milieu seemed rather rushed by the Japanese pianist Noriko Kawai, whose performance lacked the granitic firmness I've heard from her in this work in the past. Jennifer Walshe's As Mo Cheann for voice and violin induces responses of unusual vulnerability, transferring the listener into the psychological ambit of the singer's vocalisation, which exposes a fragile world of disturbing intimacy.

Also worthy of mention are Oliver Knussen's fine-grained conducting of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Knussen, Berg and Magnus Lindberg (the stimulating Gran Duo), the Arditti Quartet's inimitable handling of Xenakis (Ikhoor and Tetras), Psappha's authoritative account of Peter Maxwell Davies's heavy, rewarding Image, Reflection, Shadow and the New London Chamber Choir's impeccable-sounding performance of Luca Francesconi's moving Let Me Bleed, a "quasi requiem" for Carlo Guiliani, killed by Italian police in protests in Genoa earlier this year.

And the festival's turkey? The hare-brained idea of percussionists Chris Brannick and Richard Benjafield to perform Xenakis's Psappha for solo percussionist as a duo, each playing everything that's in the score. Doh! The fugue from the Hammerklavier or Xenakis's Herma for piano duos? And, let's face it, it would have been a lot more fun had they managed to play it together.