For decades Bromsgrove Concerts has brought music-making of the highest quality to North Worcestershire, with a blend of classic and contemporary which seems to be very much to the taste of large and enthusiastic audiences. This programme, elegantly themed to coincide with a meeting of the Housman Society, was typical of BC's continued success, bringing settings of the local poet by two composers contemporary with him, and by one composer rewardingly active today.

That composer is Worcester-based Ian Venables, whose innate gift for tonal, approachable word-setting penetrating to the core of his chosen texts, is abundantly revealed in Songs of Eternity and Sorrow.

This Finzi Friends commission is immediately involving and satisfyingly structured and was delivered with colour and involvement by tenor Andrew Kennedy (giving so much of himself in performance), supported by the delicate pianism of Simon Crawford-Phillips and a beautifully-balanced Sacconi String Quartet.

These forces are, of course, those of Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge, written nearly a century earlier but as fresh as this morning, and given here with electric dynamism and ultimate bleak transfiguration. Inspired by that masterpiece, the Gloucestershire composer-poet Ivor Gurney selected other Housman poems and scored them for the same line-up in 1920.

The result, Ludlow and Teme, though occasionally gauchely organised, is poignant and affecting, not least when we consider how desperately distant the land of lost content must have been to Gurney in his post-war shatterment.

Through his control over vocal line, Kennedy proved communicatively sympathetic to the composer's mania. The "classical" element came with Mozart's great Dissonance quartet, the Sacconis mutually empathetic and aware, but with an archness of body-language which might ultimately prove inimical to audience-engagement.

Praise to Bromsgrove Concerts for their promoting enterprise, praise to pianist Stephen Gutman for his devoted advocacy, and praise, too, to Godfrey Southerton for his heroic page-turning efforts.

But it is surely significant that so much of the music on offer in Friday's programme of contemporary piano music has not in fact found its way into the permanency of print. The evening could certainly be described as "stimulating", but stimulating of irritation instead of joyous wonderment.

Gutman's expertise in music which makes such sustained intellectual as well as quirky technical demands upon the soloist is undeniable, and a good proportion of his recital brought some genuine rewards.

John Cage's The Seasons, with its oriental influences finding common ground with Debussy, and its grim, inexorable picture of desolation in Fall, drew fluid, well-judged pianism from Gutman.

And Howard Skempton's Campanella had delightful resonances (such resourceful pedalling), the still moods of these miniatures charged with emotional overtones.

Then came two sides of Michael Finnissy: five of his huge series of tangos, generally superfluous except to their various dedicatees, and two Gershwin arrangements, full of personality, and approached by Finnissy with all rightful humility.

Two pieces by Morgan Hayes Puppet Theatre and Three Pieces for Solo Piano combined busy jaggedness with studious explorations of keyboard resources, but works by Luke Stoneham Plume and Mercury in Retrograde, though a tour de force of co-ordination, reminded me of the odd visiting child vandalising my own piano.

And Paul Whitty's Take This Personally had an allusiveness more appropriate to a name-that-tune pub quiz.

London Sinfonietta's shrewdly constructed programme for Bromsgrove Concerts revealed a wonderful panorama of music from the last 100 years.

Much of the evening was linked in some way or another with the oldest work on offer, Debussy's late Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. This masterwork for such an attractive combination came last, the performers well-attuned to its myriad moods set within a context of celtic melancholy.

A similarly elfin soundworld suffused Takemitsu's And Then I Knew 'twas Wind for the same combination, the title immediately suggesting one of the Japanese composer's favourite sources of inspiration. Occasional microtones evoked sounds of the Orient, as did Karen Jones' musky flute. The whole effect was magical in this persuasive performance.

The most recent work (2005) was Harrison Birtwistle's Crowd for solo harp (the title has roots in celtic stringed instruments), Helen Tunstall brilliant in its cross-handed complexities and exploitation of resonance.

Almost as recent is Emily Hall's Join for flute and harp. Certainly there were some beguiling sounds here, but its one-size-fits-all provenance (already it has been heard in three different combinations) seems to rob it of any convincing inevitability.

John Constable was the fourth member of the Sinfonietta here, his subtle pianism a well-judged foil for Paul Silverthorne's viola - a 1620 Amati as mellifluous as any tenor with taste - in Britten's haunting Lachrymae, in a reading which probed to the heart of these variations on fragments by the great lutenist/songwriter John Dowland.

Constable joined with Jones for a sprightly, evocative Messiaen Le Merle Noir, Debussy again at its heart. The flautist admitted in conversation with the engaging Fraser Trainer that this was her first performance of this testing piece, and she encompassed its intricacies triumphantly.