‘The East is a career’, states Mr Coningsby somewhat laconically to Lord Henry Sydney in Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 novel Tancred. This line was (perhaps more famously) employed as an epigram by Edward Said in his Orientalism, which made a prescient and penetrating historical critique of the West's portrayal of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures as exotic ‘others’.

Over the past five years, Austria's Bregenzer Festspiele has given some 22 world premieres, including five major new operas at the Festspielhaus. It is an impressive record for a festival that has had its government subsidy frozen since 1997, and that relies for 80 per cent of its funding on box office receipts and private investment. Hence, the theme chosen by David Pountney for his eleventh and final year as Intendant, ‘Bittersweet Vienna’, felt tinged with added irony.

hcmf// 2014 kicked off with a typically tough and knotty concert from Petr Kotik's chamber orchestra Ostravská banda, who performed a collection of UK premieres for small ensemble by Christian Wolff, three Czech composers and another American. The concert was billed as a tribute to Wolff, who was in attendance and who celebrates his eightieth birthday this year, and this acknowledgement of his status as one of the few remaining high modernists allowed the festival to begin with a celebration of the music with which it has been most closely associated. First up was Wolff's 37 Haiku, a setting of a poem (or 37 poems) by John Ashbery, sung by Thomas Buckner with an accompanying ensemble of oboe, horn, viola and cello. Like the poems, Wolff's settings are self-contained but accumulative, and, as the composer says in the programme notes, the ‘may form’ a whole. Variety is achieved through shifts within the accompanying instrumentation (some settings having none), line and fragmentation, instrumental technique, suggestions of common-practice harmony, flashes of word painting and spoken accompaniment from the instrumentalists (one haiku is spoken by the violinist, another is spoken in fragments across the ensemble). Coherence across these fragments is created simply through the presence of Wolff's mature and distinctive post-Webern sound world.

Neither is Morton Feldman's only opera. The libretto is a single page of text by Samuel Beckett. British director Katie Mitchell has paired her new staging of this single act work, premiered in 1977, with her staging of Beckett's 1975 short play, Footfalls. This new production was presented as part of the Infektion! festival of new music theatre at the Berlin Staatsoper in June of this year.

hcmf// continued its tradition of Monday's concerts being free and consisting of shorter concerts resulting from a competitive selection process. Many of the concerts had full audiences, and it is an achievement of the festival that these ‘shorts’ are seen as concerts on a par with their paid counterparts on other days. The audiences were notably more diverse on the Monday, with more students and families present, resulting in a more informal, but no less engaging, performance environment.

As a result of her wonderfully exciting performance of Unsuk Chin's Etudes at hcmf//'s ‘free Monday’ in 2013, Singaporean pianist Mei Yi Foo was invited back for her own concert this year. Given the depth, intensity and diversity of the works in her mid-week recital, it was surprising to discover that she is not a contemporary music specialist. Richard Baker's Breaking The Ground (2003) contrasted furious bass material, rhythmic and syncopated, with gentler, higher-register patterns, freer rhythmically but on repetition becoming more energised. These distinct materials are gradually drawn together, exploiting the range of the keyboard and creating a very satisfying organic unity. Thomas Adès's Still Sorrowing (1992) is an early work by the composer, its Cagean preparations gradually removed by the page-turner towards the end; a fey, elusive, dream-like piece, it shows the questionable fluidity of conception that is a hallmark of the composer's style. Jukka Tiensuu's Fantango (1984) was a powerfully swinging entertainment; despite their title and miniaturism, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) were more substantial, the pianist providing a delightfully characterful account of the concluding ‘derangement’ of Mad Girl With Flaxen Hair.

Sunglasses forever raised, a slowly fading graffito of Igor Stravinsky looks out from an old wooden door into the streets of Huddersfield. This feels appropriate en route to an hcmf// event, but when coming home from a thoroughly un-Stravinskian concert at midnight, passing bars bursting with young clubbers, his harsh stare disconcerts.