The 61st Aldeburgh Festival, ending today, marks another of the institution’s turning points, for it is the last of 10 under the artistic direction of the composer Thomas Adès. He is handing over to the pianist and conductor Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who has figured in three concerts this year, and who, as a French musician with strong links to Messiaen and modernism, would seem to betoken a drastic swerve from the English ethos of the festival’s inspirer, Benjamin Britten. Not that one really fears he would be dethroned — 10 of Britten’s works are on the current programme — but it was nice to be reminded of his centrality by the witty, nostalgic recollections of John Amis, speaking at Jubilee Hall and sharing an Aldeburgh memory as long as anyone’s.

There again, the recital that Aimard gave at Snape Maltings was a study in musical fundamentals that transcended questions of English, French or any other allegiance. Bach’s The Art of Fugue was the work he addressed, though he did not play all of it, or in the printed order, and he interleaved the movements with miniatures from the Jatekok (Games) collection by Gyorgy Kurtag, one of the festival’s resident composers.

For Aimard, the subtlety of these pieces reflects Bach’s own, and the juxtaposition follows Kurtag’s procedure in the piano- duet recitals he gives with his wife, Marta, where Jatekok selections are interspersed with Bach arrangements by him. (They had performed such a sequence the previous night at Snape.) Any composer would be dwarfed by Bach, and I find it hard to remember much about Aimard’s Kurtag interludes except that the contrast they provided always came as a pleasant shock; but in one case the frisson was more profound. Aimard placed the final, unfinished Fuga a 3 Soggetti not at the concert’s end, but just before the end of the first half. When the music breaks off, heartbreakingly, in mid-phrase, and one can believe oneself at Bach’s very side, there was a Jatekok piece ready and waiting to complete the phrase and conduct us from Bach’s day to our own.

Temporal leaps were a feature of the event that immediately followed: the chamber choir Exaudi’s festively contrasting late-night appearance under James Weeks at Aldeburgh Parish Church. I well recall their spectacular account of Brian Ferneyhough’s Missa Brevis at Orford Church two festivals ago, and they made a not much less dramatic impression with Xenakis’s Nuits, a bitter expostulation on behalf of all political prisoners, an abstract setting whose use of extremist gesture creates an epic grandeur. The queasy dissonances of Byrd’s O Salutaris Hostia, coming just before, offered a surprising transition to the Xenakis world, whereas the Byrd motet Ad Dominum cum Tribularer, coming after the other modern choral work, Wolfgang Rihm’s obsessively disjunctive Quo me Rapis (a Horace setting), was like the restoration of a polyphonic flow that had been deliberately dammed up.

Of the Suffolk churches used by the festival, Blythburgh, sited on the marshes like a ship at sea, and admitting afternoon light through big, clear windows in a way that always seems unique, is perhaps the most magical. The first of two concerts I caught here was an extraordinary realisation of Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame (dating from the 1360s, a few years before the church) in a nasal, “dirty”-toned, raucous and oddly Arabic manner by France’s Ensemble Organum. Eight men bunched round a lectern read directly from the medieval neumes in a transport of authenticity. The atmosphere next afternoon couldn’t have been more different. Aimard, the German violist Tabea Zimmermann and two clarinettists, the German Johannes Zurl and the Swede Martin Frost, played pieces by Schumann and postmodern commentaries on him by Kurtag and Marco Stroppa: a stylish concert that was as un-English as possible.

The Philharmonia’s concert under Oliver Knussen at Snape the night before had, however, been touched with the Englishry of strangely similar short works by Bridge and Birtwistle. It is on these, as well as on Birtwistle’s new “Scottish” string quartet, Tree of Strings, that I hope to dwell next week.

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