Four of the six concerts in the Lincoln and Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival’s second weekend of the Home and Abroad festival gave audiences at Doddington, Stow, Grantham and Lincoln the opportunity to hear unjustly neglected twentieth-century British music.  All three major pieces – John Ireland’s expressive and at times sombre Piano Trio, played to a capacity audience at Stow Minster, Rawsthorne’s spikily atmospheric Sonata for violin and piano and the exquisite Alwyn Sonata Impromptu for violin and viola – were enthusiastically received and festival staff were bombarded with requests for information about repeat performances and recordings.

The Alwyn was performed in a concert at Doddington on Friday when festival performers from 2007 Alex Chausian and Yuri Zhislin returned to the Lincolnshire they love with Yuri’s wife Natalia Lomeiko   (a prodigious violinist)  to play  in three concerts between them.  The trio received a standing ovation after their exciting and impeccable performance of a popular transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by Sitkovetsky.

On Saturday morning in addition to the Alwyn sonata and works by Mozart and Prokofiev, husband and wife played a violin and viola arrangement by Halvorsen - Handel’s Passacaglia for harpsichord and gave this magnificent baroque piece an unmistakable Russian tone which all but had us dancing in the aisles of St. Anne’s Church in Grantham!

That evening festival goers were treated to the best in brass-band music with a concert by the multi-award-winning Fairey Band.  The Britishness of the festival’s Home and Abroad theme was to the fore here with brass favourites – marches and sea-songs, Greensleeves, Elgar Howarth and phenomenal euphonium version of “My Grandfather’s Clock” – and works by composers represented elsewhere in the festival programme such as Sullivan, Holst and Elgar, emphasising the crossover nature of this exciting event.

Another strand was added on Sunday morning at Minting where the acclaimed folk-singer Bella Hardy mesmerised the audience with the beauty of her voice and the ease of her fiddle-playing in a variety of contemporary and traditional folk-songs including one from Brigg.

Those who love the musical traditions from which this weekend’s twentieth-century works sprang were not disappointed; as well as Bach and Handel, Mozart and Schubert, Brahms and Beethoven were all featured.  Indeed the weekend came to a joyous end in the Drill Hall with a magical performance by Jack Liebeck and the festival’s director, Ashley Wass, of Beethoven’s sonata for Rudolphe Kreutzer who thought the work difficult and unplayable.   In the hands of the phenomenal Liebeck and Wass its technical demands and emotional scope were fully realised and the exuberant last movement produced another ecstatic audience response.

This weekend re-stated emphatically the centrality of LICMF to the late-summer musical scene but, as importantly, with its variety and its impeccable performances by the outstanding internationally-acclaimed musicians Ashley Wass has attracted to his native county, gave many people of shared and differing tastes enormous pleasure.  All that and a film at the university (Elgar’s Enigma Variations) and a ploughman’s lunch at a jewel of a village-hall too!