Handel at 250 and Birtwistle at 75: the opening weekend of the Cheltenham Festival celebrated both composers — and in fine style. In between came early-morning and late-night concerts of new and newish string quartets, including an American Triptych for 4 July: Crumb’s Black Angels and Reich’s Different Trains, in intense and harrowing performances by the Smith Quartet in the bar of the Town Hall’s Pillar Room.

The Town Hall itself hosted a festive two hours of Divine Music for Trumpets and Voices, devised by David Blackadder and Ben Hoffnung. The latter, Gerard Hoffnung’s son, conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a gently affectionate musical travelogue through the life of Handel, complete with a bewigged Harry Enfield, telling us his tale in a laborious German “ekksent”.

While in Rome, Handel heard shepherds piping in an Arcadian landscape: cue for the Pastoral Symphony from Messiah. His first London opera Rinaldo led to endless tussling with entrepreneurs and castrati: cue for the countertenor Iestyn Davies and trumpets from the upper galleries to provide a spendid performance of Orla tromba. And so on.

A no less eager and enthusiastic crowd gathered the following morning in the cooler air of the Pitville Pump Room to hear a rare and revelatory conversation between Harrison Birtwistle and Christopher Cook, and to hear Birtwistle’s newly completed Bogenstrich for voice, cello and piano, in a recital given by Roderick Williams, Adrian Brendel and Till Fellner. The title of Birtwistle’s understated and deeply moving lovesong to his wife is from the Rilke poem, Liebes-Lied from which it originated. The Bogenstrich refers to Rilke’s “two strings— “everything that touches you or me/ takes us together like a bow’s stroke/ that from two strings draws one voice.”

The poem’s own music extends into Birtwistle’s setting — one that has been evolving through three years — starting with Lied ohne Worte for cello and piano, now the questing and questioning second movement; and the Variationen, the work’s dark heart.

Now, the Liebes-Lied itself frames these two movements, plus a gruffly rhythmic quasi-fugue. The song is ardent in its restrained intensity, each note exquisitely poised and, finally, reaching out into the ether. Williams and Fellner performed as though they were stepping on holy ground, and found the music’s fragile yet confidently beating heart.

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