Even a decade and more after the fall of Communism, one regularly hears sorry tales of the difficulties faced by the countries of the east as they adapt to a more liberal order: Russian health-care in meltdown, the Romanian economy struggling, St Petersburg pumping untreated sewage into the Baltic, Belarus still in the grip of a Stalinist despot …. In the circumstances, contemporary music in the Baltics seems to be in remarkably good health, with two longstanding festivals in Estonia, another in Lithuania and a new event emerging in Latvia all providing encouraging testimony of the vigour of the new-music scene in the three republics.

It seems natural than Delhi-born and Brighton-based Param Vir should celebrate multiculturalism in his compositions. He has effected a convincing assimilation of the best of Western and Eastern tradition in his new piece The Theatre of Magical Beings, written for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and premièred by them on 6 May as part of their highly successful ‘Sound Investment’ scheme. At 25 minutes' duration and requiring 25 players, it is one of the most substantial works ever to come out of the project. The scoring even seems extravagant for a contemporary chamber ensemble: it calls for 12 string players and there is a considerable array of exotic percussion instruments, split into two groups of skin, wood and metal.

Mauricio Kagel's Eine Brise, a ‘fleeting action’ for 111 cyclists, was one of the signature events of the Aldeburgh Festival this year, a bizarre procession along the beach front, creating an evanescent, mobile performance of honking, whistling, and singing. It was a brilliantly absurdist gesture – and typical Kagel, you might think. But Eine Brise, composed in 1996, was the exception in Aldeburgh's focus on Kagel's recent music. Their mini-retrospective of his music of the last couple of decades revealed how the surrealist master of the 1960s and 70s has developed into a more complex figure, at once more conventional and more elusive.

The world première of Benjamin Britten's Two Pieces (his title) for violin, viola and piano on 9 July provided further proof of his precocious genius, and also hinted intriguingly at the turning his compositional career never took. The concert that presented the Britten trio and another première, David Matthews's Duet Variations for violin and piano, was organized by Haus Publishing to launch Matthews's new biography of Britten, and it was while researching the book that Matthews came across the score of the Two Pieces, written in late 1929 for a chamber group in which he played the viola. Like the Quartettino, which it immediately predates, the Two Pieces shows Britten trying his hand at a Bergian expressionism. A note in his diary at the time (November 1929), quoted in the programme for the concert, reveals the direction his mind was taking: ‘I am thinking much about modernism in art, debating whether Impressionism, Expressionism, Classicism etc are right. I have half decided on Schoenberg’. His music confirms his words.

In the mid-1960s Roger Smalley was a leading exponent of the music of Stockhausen (whose student he became). But except for his own performance of Klavierstück IX (at his piano recital which I did not hear) this early influence was hardly to be felt in the 60th birthday celebrations hosted by Trinity College of Music, London in May. Under the overall artistic direction of Douglas Finch, a series of concerts and recitals presented a cross-section of work from the past two decades.