The Cheltenham Music Festival - indelibly linked in my mind to summer’s height, to swarms of sunbathers on Imperial Gardens - began moistly and louringly this year, yet it represented a bright new start for the 63-year-old institution. This was the first festival under the direction of Meurig Bowen, who worries in a brochure note about the relevance of the term “classical music”, but who has resisted the pressure of political correctness to diversify his programmes with eclecticism gone mad. This remains decidedly a festival of high seriousness, with entertainments on the fringes andfolk music among the wide-ranging themes, but the classical canon at its heart.

It’s true, though, that the first concert I attended - given by the Cheltenham Festival Chorus and other local choirs, with percussion-ists (Richard Benjafield, Chris Brannick Joby Burgess, Adrian Spillett), pianists (Clive William-son, Shelagh Sutherland, Bojana Dimkovic) and Birmingham Conservatoire brass at the Town Hall - ended with a work, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, hellbent on wrenching classical seriousness into populism or even demagoguery. A big baritone solo (sung by Alan Opie) in this cantata, by a composer who obliged the Nazis with alternative Midsummer Night’s Dream music to the Jewish Mendelssohn’s, really did evoke a Hitlerian rant. Unremitting percussion bangs did not lessen the rabble-rousing effect. Elsewhere Orff’s neomedieval cuteness had the automated charm of Abba. The conductor, Gareth Hancock, did a perfectly good job, and it was sweet to see the little children sing – or perhaps not, as Orff still strikes me as a profoundly bad influence.

Some people worry about Percy Grainger’s right-wing sentiments, and doubtless the “blue-eyed” ideology behind his ballet The Warriors, the concert’s opening item, conducted by Benjafield, doesn’t bear examination. However, populism in Grainger’s hands seems indistinguishable from the wackiest exuberance. As for Steve Reich’s Sextet, the other item on a programme that might almost have been designed as a sly aesthetic inquiry, the question of whether its repetitive phases are interesting in the way they interlock or are merely a kind of mass hypnosis hung in the air.

Classical music’s value was unambiguously asserted next morning at the Schubert and Chopin recital by the brilliant young Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter at the Pittville Pump Room. Then, at Tewkesbury Abbey in the evening, the festival mounted a choral-instrumental programme, where exploitation of cathedral space, and contrast of old and new, Tallis and Messiaen, was sly, but only in a sublime sort of way. The items fitted into a ritual, peripatetic sequence involving the Oriel Singers under Tim Morris and the St Cecilia Singers under Russell Burton - they sang separately and together, opening with Tallis’s 40-part Spem in alium - the organist Carleton Etherington, and the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra under Timothy Reynish, who recreated the thunderous immensities of Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

Bowen secured the master of the queen’s music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, as composer-in-residence, and seven of his works are being performed. His Violin Sonata, premiered last month in Orkney by Ilya Gringolts and Aleksandar Madzar, was repeated by them in a morning recital at the Pump Room. It is a single movement, conceived as “an imaginary, traffic-free walk across Rome”, a student haunt of Davies’s, and as such recalls a nostalgic poem by FT Prince, whose title, Walks in Rome, already alludes to a book by Stendhal. Davies acknowledges the influence of a book by an Italian architect friend, who inspired him when he was writing his Naxos Quartet No 7, a string depiction of Borromini buildings, and the violin sonata starts with material from that work.

The structure is pellucid: effectively a theme and variations, for the opening tune never goes away, though it is bombarded with some fiendishly elaborate piano figuration, rendered by Mazdar with real insight into Davies’s idiom. The violin part is predominantly linear and highlying, and embraces a concerto-like accompanied cadenza. Immediately after it, we hear a D major memory of a folk song Davies heard sung from within a prison back in the 1950s. And the final image of this likeable sonata is a clatter of church bells.

If there was a sneaking sense that Gringolts had not been as stretched by the work as the pianist, the balance was redressed by his amazing account of Bartok’s monumental solo Sonata. And I was happy to catch another Davies piece that afternoon. The excellent Wells Cathedral School Chamber Choir, boisterously directed by Nigel Perrin and singing from various locations in the church of All Saints (another “spatial” programme), performed O Magnum Mysterium, the beautiful carol setting Davies made for children’s voices when he was a young music-master at nearby Cirencester Grammar. After the Orff, it was like a benediction.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette