Its opening weekend saw the YLMF get off to a cracking start. There was nothing here to daunt anyone apprehensive about "modern day music" - the festival's subtitle - but plenty to set pulses racing.

To judge by Matthew McCright's piano recital on Saturday and Eleanor Meynell's lunchtime song-recital yesterday, there are further treats in store this week.

Barely 36 hours off the plane from Minneapolis, McCright was still right on the ball. He warmed up with the shifting patterns of John Adams's China Gates and the ruminative First Piano Prelude by Garrett Sholdice, newly revised. There was more gripping minimalism from Philip Glass and a dreamily romantic Simone's Lullaby by Terry Riley. Ailís Ní Ríain contributed Into The Sea Of Waking Dreams - five thoughtful miniatures with brief angry bursts.

But it was six of Steve Crowther's hugely invigorating Morris Dances that most caught the imagination. Based on the fast, swinging cross-currents of its Enigma theme, and inspired by personal friends, it flitted, flirted and flowed, with a brief elegiac interlude.

The stupendous sweep of Frederic Rzewski's Four North American Ballads filled McCright's second half. His use of politically-inspired blues provide an entertaining thread. But the blackly remorseless Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues make Bartok's Allegro Barbaro sound like child's play. McCright's energy was always coloured by insight.

Meynell devoted her flexible soprano mostly to settings of W H Auden's poetry and a Dowland piece he helped to edit. Four pieces from Britten's mid-twenties were perfectly suited to her lively personality. But her gently floated tone at the end of Maconchy's elegy to Yeats was when she really began to beguile. She captured the inspired lethargy of David Power's Tired Tim (Walter de la Mare) and found a touching lilt in LeFanu's Lay Your Sleeping Head.

Adam Gorb cleverly tapped into the cruel humour of Miss Gee, to whirling piano undercurrents. There were fierce settings of Epitaph On A Tyrant by Matthew Taylor and Benjamin Wallfisch, the latter marginally more engaging. Glynn's easy pianism provided firm support.