Meurig Bowen, now in his fifth year as Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival, continues to reinforce this illustrious annual event's reputation for programming new works by major composers. His scheduling of the majority of the 2012 festival's premières on the second day – 5 July – was exceptionally convenient for aficionados of contemporary music in general and served to reduce markedly this reviewer's carbon footprint.

Contemporary music ensemble Psappha gave three world premières in a concert at the University of Manchester's Cosmo Rodewald Hall on 8 March 2013. Their programme began with first performances of brief works by two young composers connected with the University. I Lost My Way in Dixieland, by Thomas Jarvis (b.1991), was a deftly realized deconstruction and reinvention of a popular jazz style, with a throwaway ending that made an apt parting gesture for a witty and enjoyable pastiche. And Sempadan, by Sayyid Shafiee (b.1987), made effective use of offstage trumpet and trombone interacting with on-stage clarinet, percussion and double bass, to suggest the concept of two different but complementary cultures.

In conceiving his latest large-scale work for string quartet and orchestra, John Adams states that its inception arose from a lifelong obsession with the music of Beethoven. Out of this fixation, the first impulse for creating a referential work of musical homage came to Adams from hearing a performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, a ballet known for its conscious borrowing of material from the 18th-century composer Pergolesi. It is that absorption of another composer's vernacular and fashioning it into a new and unique musical work that provides the primary creative foundation for Absolute Jest.

It seems improbable that the Tallis Scholars can have given their first concert 40 years ago: while the rest of us have crumbled, their conductor, Peter Phillips, hardly seems older now that he did when he founded the group. New music has been an increasingly important part of their repertoire over the decades, rubbing shoulders with the Renaissance stalwarts, and so it was gratifying that their anniversary concert should feature two world premières and one first London hearing. The venue on 7 March could hardly have been more imposing: the singers were stationed under the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the audience radiating out from them towards three of the four points of the compass; and it seemed that most of the British musical establishment had come to pay homage and say thanks.

Radio Rewrite, whose world première by the London Sinfonietta (who co-commissioned it) was warmly greeted by the capacity audience at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 March 2013, represents a fascinating postmodern symbiosis that attests to the veteran minimalist composer's continuing quest to cross new aesthetic boundaries in his eighth decade. It formed the centrepiece of a stunning concert, broadcast live by BBC Radio 3, which marked the first leg of a UK Reich tour that preceded the work's first USA airing (in Stanford on 16 March by the other commissioning ensemble, Alarm Will Sound). Reich concerts are occasions, and here the master himself together with percussionist David Hockings opened the programme with Clapping, then joined Sound Intermedia in their artful shaping of the amplified soundscape in a virtuoso performance by Mats Bergström of Electric Counterpoint. It was a performance of that work in Krakow in 2011, by Johnny Greenwood from the rock band Radiohead, that led to Reich's exploration and exploitation of their repertoire – notably two songs, ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ – in his new work.

Between April and June 2012, pianist Noriko Ogawa presented four recitals titled Reflections on Debussy, in the Mirror of the East, which presented his major piano works, with compositions by Japanese composers Takemitsu, Yoshimatsu, and two commissions from Yoshihiro Kanno (b.1953). The first of the Kanno works presented, on 25 May, was Sky Maze (2011) for piano and organ (featuring Jonathan Scott), oddly placed in a concert otherwise devoted to two-piano repertoire (with Martin Roscoe). The programme note revealed the work was originally to have been premièred in August 2011 at the MUZA Kawasaki concert hall – which was badly damaged by the earthquake and tsunami of the previous March – but offered no clue as to the work's intriguing title.

When Gabriel Prokofiev first came to prominence in the UK, comparisons were inevitably made with his famous grandfather. Gabriel has since forged a distinctive musical identity for himself, making the shared name all but irrelevant. But in Russia that name carries even greater significance, so it was little surprise that the world première of Gabriel's Cello Concerto in Saint Petersburg, on 18 May, was in a concert that included at least two Prokofievs. In fact, a third Prokofiev was also featured, as the event began with poetry by Oleg: Gabriel's father and Sergei's son.

When the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra wanted to commission Kaija Saariaho for a work to perform at the Westergasfabriek Gashoulder, a gasholder building restored as a performance space, it did so through a consortium including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony. The Boston Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Mena, gave the first American performance of the work, entitled Circle Map, in Symphony Hall in November.

Michael van der Aa's multi-medium opera Sunken Garden had its world première in seven performances in the Barbican Theatre, borrowed for the purpose from the English National Opera, in the second half of April; I went late in the run, encouraged by the reviews of the opening nights by my confrères and -sœurs, who were all-a-quiver at the use of 3-D projection in the production – but it's not the first time I've wondered if I'd been in the same place as other reviewers: I was bored to tears and, having given it an optimistic hour's grace to establish its pace and purpose, spent the remaining hour waiting for it to come to an end.

For six lively and exhilarating days at the end of August 2012, the Presteigne Festival's thirtieth anniversary was celebrated in 16 concerts featuring no fewer than nine new specially commissioned pieces, most of them from composers already closely associated with this much-anticipated annual event held in and around a modest borders town in Powys. Composer-in-residence Sally Beamish was well represented with a generous selection from her output for instrumental and chamber forces, including the premières of two new arrangements of her earlier works. Each concert was programmed with exemplary care by Artistic Director George Vass, resulting in a rich assortment of contemporary and rarely encountered twentieth-century music together with mainstream repertoire.

In an uncommonly enterprising programme, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Garry Walker, presented a world première, a UK première, a London première and a first professional performance in the same Maida Vale Studio concert on 25 January 2013, recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3's afternoon schedules. Despite the inclement weather, all four composers were present, and they all spoke briefly but engagingly about their piece. Though roughly of the same generation, each composer offered a refreshingly contrasting approach to orchestral writing in the present century.

Due to Hurricane Sandy, the New York-based JACK Quartet were unable to cross the Atlantic to join forces with the Arditti Quartet at London's Wigmore Hall on 31 October 2012 for the British premières, now postponed, of 2012-S for two string quartets by James Clarke and the string octet Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten by Mauro Lanza. In lieu, the Ardittis substituted James Clarke's String Quartet No. 1 (2002–03) and Wolfgang Rihm's String Quartet No. 13 (2011), joining the first performances in the UK, as originally advertised, of quartets by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen and British-born, Berlin-domiciled Rebecca Saunders.

Deirdre Gribbin's piano concerto, The Binding of the Years, written between 2009 and 2012, was given its UK première by soloist Finghin Collins with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Alan Buribayev at a Maida Vale Studio concert on 15 March. Its evocative title refers to the gathering and securing of 52 reeds that symbolized the old years in Aztec culture; that civilization's rituals connected with fire and time form part of the inspiration behind Gribbin's new work.

Samuel Beckett, famed for his strikingly negative approach in his stage play Waiting for Godot (1953), also has a string of prose and poetry in similar vein to his credit over the years. So it was that Spitalfields Festival came to commission Alec Roth to write music to accompany a performance of Beckett's ‘Old Earth’ from his prose work Fizzles written 1972–75. This received its world première at Spitalfields Summer Festival 2012, suitably housed in the stark dark space of The Village Underground, a disused warehouse resembling an abandoned railway tunnel in London's East End. Trying to find my seat in the dark, when I attended the first night, 15 June 2012, shadowy figures were already chanting what turned out to be verses from James Joyce's Ulysses as a fittingly mysterious, if unheralded, informal prologue. This was followed by drama directed by Jonathan Holmes, founder of Jericho House, with music by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Christophers.

You're probably wondering why a violin concerto was given its UK première by the chamber ensemble Psappha? An informative programme note by Paul Griffiths for the 15 February concert revealed that Swedish composer Klas Torstensson (b. 1951) had in fact written a much longer, though still compactly scored, work in 2010 and had ‘squashed it down’ in length and further reduced the number of players. The work's full title is Pocket Size Violin Concerto – scored for soloist with unconducted accompaniment from piano, flute, and cello. Whilst compression of this kind is not uncommon in other branches of the arts, and concision is a noble artistic aim, one's fear was that such drastic pruning might have short-circuited the music's arguments. Happily this proved unfounded; and whilst the original half-hour's duration might have been pushing it a bit, the modified version (at a whisker under 17 minutes) seemed just about right.

Michael Zev Gordon had an intriguing idea in choosing to centre his new piece – Bohortha – on a visit he made to the small hamlet of this name that lies in a remote Cornwall peninsula, close to the sea: he sought to explore the concept of ‘the passing of time’. So it was that the world première of Bohortha was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on 3 October 2012, opening a programme to also include Mahler's highly emotive Rückert Lieder and was then completely outflanked after the interval by a rare performance of Shostakovich's starkly political Symphony No. 4.

One of the most enjoyable characteristics of London musical life is that it is peopled by a generous number of foreigners who, every so often, take it upon themselves to enlighten the rest of us as to the music we are missing from back home. These can, of course, be hit-and-miss occasions, but it's in the nature of exploring unknown music of any age that you will happily put up with a handful of duds if you come away with a real discovery ringing in your ears. The Second London Festival of Bulgarian Culture (I seem to have missed the First) ran in various venues over the course of November 2012 and also accommodated art, film, literature, theatre and other forms of music (folk, pop and jazz). It opened its classical batting with a concert of ‘Bulgarian and British Symphonic Folk Songs’ in Cadogan Hall on 3 November, with the Varna Symphony Orchestra, Paulina Voices (the choir of St Paul's Girls' School) and the Holst Choir (from James Allen's Girls' School) conducted by Martin Georgiev. Pancho Vladigerov (1899–1978) being the only Bulgarian composer generally known to the outside world, it made sense to begin with him. His Shumen Miniatures, six attractive piano pieces based on folk-tunes from the town, Shumen, where Vladigerov grew up, were written in 1934 and orchestrated at some later date vouchsafed neither by the concert-programme nor the worklist at www.vladigerov.org. They embrace a variety of lighter moods: the first and fourth pieces offer lazy and lyrical summer-evening hazes and the second and third vigorous dances; the proximity of the fifth to the style of Enescu brought a reminder of the long common border Bulgaria shares with Romania (Shumen is around 100 km away from it).

In my recent review of a Col Legno disc of music by Luke Bedford (born 1978), I described this composer as ‘a major voice’. That disc included the piece Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale, for solo violin, solo viola and 11 players (2011); this concert by the London Sinfonietta under Sian Edwards began with a reworking for 10 players and no soloists, hence its new title, Wonderful No-Headed Nightingale (the heads are lost but the bird sings on). This was the UK première of the revision. In absentia soloists, strangely, the lines seemed even more expressive. Perhaps it was the rather small space of the South Bank's Purcell Room, but climaxes tended towards overwhelming; the use of quartertones seemed emphasized by acoustics, also.

Although John McCabe's Rainforest II, of 1987, is in effect a chamber concerto for trumpet and 11 strings, his extensive body of concertante works has lacked an official trumpet concerto. La Primavera, which had its première on 15 June 2012, now happily fills that gap. The subtitle derives from McCabe's consideration of two aspects of the approach of Spring: the vitality of burgeoning growth and the flowering of the new or refreshed life as it expands.

An 80th birthday concert full of the spirit of youthful exploration reflected the innovative interactive aesthetic of Andre Hajdu, the Hungarian-Israeli composer, whose oeuvre is gradually gaining wider international exposure. Presented by the Jerusalem Music Centre on 29 March 2012, the programme featured works from the last quarter of a century for chamber duo and solo piano, including two premières, culminating in an improvisational interactive jam session by an array of students and colleagues, joined by the composer himself at the piano. To begin was Hajdu's Sonatine for Flute and Cello (1990) ‘in the French style’ performed with panache by the flautist Yossi Arnheim and cellist Amir Eldan. It is an elegantly written work radiating the spirit of Hajdu's teachers Milhaud and (less overtly) Messiaen, with whom he studied in Paris in the 1950s and 60s. Beneath the light-hearted veneer of polyphonic textures is a serious, plangent expressiveness. The first movement, libre et gai, moves from the chirpy, Poulenc-like delicacy of a cat-and-mouse imitative chase, building tension towards a final stretto. In the second movement, molto moderato, Arnheim wove a lyrical cantilena for flute over gentle cello accompaniments, giving way to rarified high cello registers shadowed by eloquent lower lines of the flute. An exuberant dance-like finale, Libre mais un peu rythmé, increased in drama before receding to a tranquil conclusion.