If you’re wondering what a Neuk is, don’t ask a Dutchman – it’s apparently very rude. In Scotland, you’re on safer ground in Fife's lovely string of harbour villages, decked with bunting, fishing boats and crow-stepped gables, sea views on one side and golf courses on the other. East Neuk also has a rather quirky music festival, which just celebrated its fifth year, a polished mix of top-notch chamber music and off-the-wall electronic, performed in unusual places.

The pianist Christian Zacharias was making his third appearance in five years. His eclectic concert with the Leopold String Trio and flautist Alison Mitchell included a frothily elegant playing of Schubert’s Sonatina for Violin and Piano in D — the violinist Isabelle van Keulen on top form — and a fizzing Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor. A very different sound came from the German Leipzig Quartet in their concert in clifftop St Monan’s Parish Church, powering through Schumann’s Quartet in A, bringing the same rich, mahogany intensity to Mendelssohn’s E minor, if occasionally lacking subtlety.

Zacharias returned on Saturday night, with a programme of late Schubert in Crail Church. The Rellstab settings from Schubert’s Schwanengesang, full of intense longing, were a nice foil for the yearning of his Piano Sonata in A — typically thoughtful, simple East Neuk programming — with Zacharias lithe and imaginative. Stephan Loges’s variable baritone made less success of the Rellstab songs. Frülingssehnsucht (Longing in Springtime) was enthusiastically springy, but Loges did little with its insistent repetition. The raging torrents of Aufenthalt (Dwelling Place) were more a dark, still pool, ponderously slow, if replete with spine-chilling foreboding.

Spine-chilling sensations also surfaced in dank Dunino Den, in Out There, a series of festival commissions from the composer Martin Parker, directing festivalgoers to specific locations armed with headphones and a Parker-loaded MP3 player. Rumoured to be in spiritual use by the Picts, more recently for illegal raves, Dunino Den is a secluded green hollow flanked by rocky precipices. Parker’s piece, mixing electronics and live music, is not without cliché, but is literally transformative, making this relatively pleasant place noticeably darker and more claustrophobic. That same sense informed his more meditative work for Crail Harbour, its hints of fishing boats and shipwrecks ghosting a more thoughtful reality over the tourists munching crab sandwiches on the harbour wall below.

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