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In the festival’s first Cadogan Hall concert, violinist Vilde Frang and pianist Michail Lifits play Ravel’s blues-influenced Violin Sonata, Mozart’s sunny Violin Sonata in G major, K379, and the dazzling 1984 Partita by Witold Lutosławski, a composer central to the festival’s focus on Polish music.

Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music play works by Handel and the Roman composers who inspired him. Soprano Sophie Bevan sings two Italian cantatas in a programme including concerti grossi by Corelli and Valentini and keyboard miniatures by Bernardo Pasquini.

Paul Van Nevel and the Huelgas Ensemble mine the rich and rarely performed repertoire of Renassiance and Baroque Poland in motets by Zieleński, Klabon, Demantius and Marenzio, including the earliest-known setting of a Polish text, the mid-15th-century ‘Chwała tobie, Gospodznie’ (Praise to Thee, O Lord).

Pianist Imogen Cooper, soprano Ruby Hughes, tenor James Gilchrist and guitarist Christoph Denoth mark Britten’s centenary in a sequence of song-cycles and miniatures, from Night Piece (Notturno) to A Charm of Lullabies, My beloved is mine and Abraham and Isaac.

Music for strings by Tippett, Holst and Britten, plus two dramatic works for the female voice: Britten’s Phaedra and Lennox Berkeley’s Four Poems of St Teresa of Avila. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly joins conductor Sian Edwards and the Britten Sinfonia.

Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth and her all-female brass ensemble, tenThing, play a vibrant programme of tangos, seguidillas and serenades by Bizet, Copland, Grieg and Piazzolla – and a new work by British composer Diana Burrell.

Pianist Barry Douglas directs Camerata Ireland in music by Britten and his peers, including Young Apollo, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Priaulx Rainier’s Movement for strings, and Shostakovich’s sparkling Piano Concerto No. 1 (featuring trumpeter Alison Balsom).

Late-15th-century motets from the Eton Choirbook alternate with music by Gustav Holst and his daughter Imogen and the UK premiere of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Moth Requiem in an alluring programme from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Singers and the Nash Ensemble under Nicholas Kok.

Robin Tritschler sings Warlock’s The Curlew with the London Conchord Ensemble. The intimate programme moves from Imogen Holst’s Phantasy Quartet to Poulenc’s Sextet and Thomas Adès’s arrangement of François Couperin’s Les baricades mistérieuses.

John Woolrich and Tansy Davies add two new variations to ‘Sellinger’s Round’, the Elizabethan melody embellished by Imogen Holst, Britten, Tippett and their contemporaries in 1952. Ben Johnson sings the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings in the English Chamber Orchestra’s matinee, which includes Lutosławski’s Paroles tissées.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 3 New Generation Artists the Signum Quartet explore the Bartók-influenced String Quartet No. 3 of one of the 20th century’s most accomplished composers, Elizabeth Maconchy. Pianist and fellow NGA Christian Ihle Hadland joins the quartet for Brahms’s F minor Piano Quintet, another work of passion and precision.

Violinist Terje Tønnesen and the Camerata Nordica perform Britten’s Lachrymae, Walton’s Sonata for strings and Tippett’s Little Music, and give the world premiere of Britten’s early Elegy for strings, written four years before the Simple Symphony.

In the last Cadogan Hall concert of the festival, tenor Ian Bostridge, lutenist Elizabeth Kenny and the viol consort Fretwork mark the 450th anniversary of the birth of John Dowland, the laureate of the Elizabethan lute song, in a sequence of galliards, lachrimaes and fantasias.