On Saturday night at the Maltings the air buzzed. There was scarcely a spare seat. For this Britten Sinfonia concert gave us a tantalising preview of the Aldeburgh Festival's future under its next artistic director, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Not for him, or Britten Sinfonia, a concert shaped like a string of sausages. Instead we were taken on a questing journey. Primed by the restless imagination of Haydn (Symphony No 22), we leapt into gnomic 20th-century miniatures, adrift in space and time. Mysterious slivers of György Kurtág followed expressionist slices of Schoenberg. Webern's Op 5 pieces, arranged for string orchestra, muddied progress a bit. But nothing stopped Ives's The Unanswered Question sounding thrillingly strange. Mozart's Coronation piano concerto, after the interval, was sprightly and elegant, though it came as an anticlimax after this visionary first half.

More traditional programming still flourishes at the festival. I Fagiolini's William Byrd programme on Saturday was intelligently designed. If the singers proved more decent than incandescent, the atmosphere of Aldeburgh's parish church kept spirits soaring.

No assistance was necessary on Sunday at Blythburgh Church, when the Dutch baritone Robert Holl delivered a Schubert programme with such natural force and passion that resistance was impossible. Singing about the “deep grave” in Totengräbers Heimwehe (“Gravedigger's Lament”), Holl's mouth seemed the grave itself. And in we jumped, safe in the power and resonance of this humane voice, rooted deep within his body. He was quite an experience. So in his quiet way was the pianist Rudolf Jansen, as subtle an accompanist as you could find.

After that, layers of the audience melted away. Perhaps they were hiding from Thomas Adès's concert with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. A pity, for Ligeti's With Pipes, Drums and Reed Fiddles, with the mezzo Katalin Károlyi, offered nothing but fun, and Adès's brilliant Living Toys danced with wit. The purpose of Gerald Barry's Beethoven stayed opaque, as it did at its premiere, but it sounded well in the Maltings resonance.

So did the soprano Natalia Zagorinskaia in Kurtág's milestone piece, Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova, as cryptic and secretive as ever. At the end, the beaming composer shook hands with every musician. My sentiments exactly.

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