Welsh music is not absolutely guaranteed in the programme of a small Welsh music festival, despite its ever-pressing claims.

Lower Machen has often been one of the exceptions, this year including two works at its opening concert performed by the Welsh Chamber Players in the presence of at least three Welsh composers - Christopher Painter, Mervyn Burtch and former festival director Peter Reynolds.

In moving steadily away from darkness, Painter's Buried Light and Burtch's Dawn and Sunrise seemed fit comments on the cash-strapped plight of festivals everywhere and their determination to survive.

The elegiac quality of the Painter work, a superb example of employing serial techniques without being enslaved by them, may have been personal but it, too, added to the mood of potential loss and happy revival.

Its motion upwards and outwards was carried by solo violinist Matthew Jones with an increasing virtuosic confidence matched by the supporting strings.

Burtch's new day breaking has a louring quality which might have been lessened in a bigger acoustic space, though the work could not have asked for a more sympathetic performance from musicians concentrating hard on its even tempo.

Co-festival director Peter Esswood, having conducted a lively version of Holst's Holberg Suite, joined the band's cello section for Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, in which Mr Jones was the dazzling soloist and Andrew Wilson Dickson the central harpsichord player.

Baroque-instrument versions of the work are legion but Nigel Kennedy's example has restored these brilliant, steelier alternatives. Light all round, then.