Last Thursday György Kurtág and his wife Márta played pieces from his piano collection Játékok on the sonically upholstered upright with its almost woolly sound now favoured by the composer, making his often spiky fragments into the musical equivalent of comfort food. On Friday the Kurtágs were in the audience at the Snape Maltings to hear more of Játékok played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, one of contemporary performance’s keenest intellects, who restored the clarity and clean lines we associate with these works, paradoxically ending up sounding more like Kurtág than Kurtág had. The Hungarian’s music shared the bill with Bach: The Art of Fugue, spliced, sometimes with only a beat’s pause, with Kurtág until the cumulative effect was that of a continuous composition.

Aimard’s wide dynamic range and sensitive colouring exerted a near-hypnotic effect, both contrasting old and new and uncovering their similar sinewy logic. Just as athletes now run faster and jump higher than was once thought possible, so young musicians play with more dazzling ease than their predecessors – and, come to that, write glitteringly virtuosic works for orchestra with casual ease. The Britten-Pears Ensemble, alumni in Aldeburgh’s biennial course in contemporary composition and performance (Thomas Adès and Julian Anderson are products), set the Jubilee Hall by the ears on Friday. Topped and tailed by masters (Lutoslawski and Lindberg), seven works by composers under 30 combined exuberant imagination with tight control to electrifying effect. Favourites were: vivid contrasts in Vlad Maistorovici’s Ocean Wing and Sasha Siem’s Virginia Woolf-inspired AfTeRsHoCk , ranging from tiny skitterings and scrabblings to jabbing, ungainsayable life force.