AT a time when classical music lovers are either travelling north to Edinburgh for the festival or south to London for the Proms, we’re fortunate that a group of Britain’s finest musicians decide every year to come to Northumberland.

The Corbridge Chamber Music Festival is now, remarkably, in its 17th year, and while the festival is still run by its founders, the Gould Piano Trio and clarinettist, Robert Plane, the ever-changing line-up of excellent guest musicians means that it always offers something new and unexpected.

This year I went to the Saturday evening concerts, Exploring Beethoven and late-night Americana, and was sorry to miss the morning’s English Matinee, featuring works by two composers quite unfamiliar to me, Robin Milford and William Yeates Hurlstone. The Corbridge Festival is always very well programmed.

It must be said, though, that while St Andrew’s Church is a lovely setting for music making, it is not ideal for music listening. It has remarkably uncomfortable pews, poor sightlines and a variable acoustic, according to where one sits.

Add to this the elderly age of the audience (this is a classical concert problem that the festival has not yet solved) and the best compliment I can pay to the concentrated quality of both playing and listening on Saturday evening was that throughout both concerts I heard not a single cough.

This was particularly extraordinary in the performance of the opening work, Beethoven’s F minor string quartet, a piece of music described in the programme notes as “ruthless” and played accordingly.

Chamber music is often described as a conversation between different instrumental voices, but Beethoven’s string quartets are monologues, the composer asserting, doubting and contradicting himself through all the instruments at once, and this performance showed why Beethoven’s deafness was so devastating.

As a composer he grappled above all with the problem of how to make people hear his music exactly as he heard it in his head, and these performers (David Adams, Lucy Gould, Tom Dunn and Alice Neary) could be watched making the finest performance decisions about bowing and timing, sustaining and waiting, a masterclass in getting every sound just right.

The other two Beethoven pieces were less introspective. If the string quartets pull the listener into the music, the violin sonata in G Major and the piano Trio in B Flat, reach out to the audience, with a greater emphasis on melodies and an obvious enjoyment of melodic games.

The dialogue between Lucy Gould and Benjamin Frith in the violin sonata was so barbed that there were moments that I could imagine one or other of them taking off like a jazz musician into an improvised challenge of their own.

The Archduke Trio was, by contrast, the most relaxed work of the evening, each member of the Gould Piano Trio now leading the way, now stepping back from the fray, drawing breath, returning with even more force.

And so, after a brief break, to Americana. John Williams’ Air and Simple Gifts, written for Barack Obama’s inauguration, is a clever but rather banal arrangement of Joseph Brackett’s Simple Gifts, the American folk-dance tune much loved by classical composers.

Tibor Serly’s Chamber Folk Music is a Hungarian’s account of 20th century urban American, interpreted here as the score for a noisily overwhelming cartoon and as an interesting contrast to Bohuslav Martinu’s La Revue de Cuisine, scored for B flat clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin and piano.

This is described as a ‘jazz ballet’ but sounds more like circus or vaudeville music. Either way, both these works were, unlike Beethoven’s, determinedly secular, music for entertainment not improvement.

But my favourite late evening piece was Elliott Carter’s Ay Quai, written when the composer was 94. This featured the two instruments most mocked by other orchestral musicians, bassoon and viola, and was played with verve and insouciance by Tom Dunn and Amy Harman as a wry reminder that classical music can be funny.