Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the Hampstead and Highgate Festival continues to fly the flag for accessible contemporary music alongside traditional classics.

To support a new piece by Cecilia McDowall, the festival turned to the admirable Cavatina Chamber Music Trust, also Hampstead-based and also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Cavatina’s mission is to bring music to young people and vice-versa, subsidising ticket prices for students of all ages at high-quality concerts.

McDowall’s piece, aptly named Cavatina at Midnight, makes reference to the celebrated cavatina of Beethoven’s op 130 string quartet, to Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale — written in a garden just a couple of roads away from Christ Church nearly two centuries ago — and to the famous recording of cellist Beatrice Harrison in nocturnal duet with a nightingale in her own garden. Those threads are tied together in spellbindingly evocative writing for clarinet and cello, exquisitely realised by Catriona Scott and Gemma Rosefield, ably supported by Michael Dussek at the piano.

Adam Gorb’s Reconciliation launches a sparkier, more combative dialogue for clarinet and piano but finally achieves a tranquil, mellifluous resolution in which the warring elements are pacified. To the great credit of Scott and Dussek, however, their clashing dissonances never sounded rebarbative: on the contrary, tonal beauty was a feature of the strife as much as of the peace.

Rosefield, playing with greater assurance than ever, gave a ravishing performance of Chopin’s Cello Sonata in G minor with Dussek. Outstanding was the Largo, projected as though a half-remembered dream amid the passions and turbulence of life.

They were joined again by Catriona Scott for a concluding performance of Brahms’s A minor Clarinet Trio that against all the odds endowed it with a distinctly autumnal quality on an unseasonably warm spring day.

Festival runs until 18 May. Info: 0870 033 2733; www.hamandhighfest.co.uk.