Even a decade and more after the fall of Communism, one regularly hears sorry tales of the difficulties faced by the countries of the east as they adapt to a more liberal order: Russian health-care in meltdown, the Romanian economy struggling, St Petersburg pumping untreated sewage into the Baltic, Belarus still in the grip of a Stalinist despot …. In the circumstances, contemporary music in the Baltics seems to be in remarkably good health, with two longstanding festivals in Estonia, another in Lithuania and a new event emerging in Latvia all providing encouraging testimony of the vigour of the new-music scene in the three republics.

Sally Beamish has developed a fresh and individual voice by progressively extending her musical language whilst staying true to her own values. The range of her compositions over the last decade has encompassed two symphonies, a series of concertos for an impressive array of solo instruments, chamber music, an oratorio and an opera. The starting-point for many of these scores for widely differing forces is strongly personal, based on a relationship or friendship, a feeling or an event. Such intensely private inspiration can lend even the most extravagantly orchestrated piece a chamber-like intimacy.

Will Todd, born in Durham in 1970, has an extensive output of compositions to his credit, including highly-charged operas and oratorios, largely centred around themes from northeastern England, notably the workers' struggle against early 19th and 20th-century injustice and oppression. I had heard his emotive cantata The Burning Road performed at St Albans Cathedral in February 2002 – it depicts the relentless, footsore Jarrow Marchers of 1936 who stopped in the city en route to London – and was interested to hear the follow-up in his new opera on an allied theme: The Blackened Man.

It seems natural than Delhi-born and Brighton-based Param Vir should celebrate multiculturalism in his compositions. He has effected a convincing assimilation of the best of Western and Eastern tradition in his new piece The Theatre of Magical Beings, written for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and premièred by them on 6 May as part of their highly successful ‘Sound Investment’ scheme. At 25 minutes' duration and requiring 25 players, it is one of the most substantial works ever to come out of the project. The scoring even seems extravagant for a contemporary chamber ensemble: it calls for 12 string players and there is a considerable array of exotic percussion instruments, split into two groups of skin, wood and metal.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Osmo Vänskä continue to throw new light on Sibelius. The latest discoveries came this autumn: two movements from a lost orchestral suite were given their first performances – as encores, on 19 and 20 September – during the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, now in its third year, and were ‘officially’ premièred on 24 October, when the first version of the tone poem The Oceanides was also given its first performance. The extent to which two works are intimately connected is surfacing in work undertaken by the British Sibelius expert Andrew Barnett, to whose researches this report is indebted.

Mauricio Kagel's Eine Brise, a ‘fleeting action’ for 111 cyclists, was one of the signature events of the Aldeburgh Festival this year, a bizarre procession along the beach front, creating an evanescent, mobile performance of honking, whistling, and singing. It was a brilliantly absurdist gesture – and typical Kagel, you might think. But Eine Brise, composed in 1996, was the exception in Aldeburgh's focus on Kagel's recent music. Their mini-retrospective of his music of the last couple of decades revealed how the surrealist master of the 1960s and 70s has developed into a more complex figure, at once more conventional and more elusive.

The world première of Benjamin Britten's Two Pieces (his title) for violin, viola and piano on 9 July provided further proof of his precocious genius, and also hinted intriguingly at the turning his compositional career never took. The concert that presented the Britten trio and another première, David Matthews's Duet Variations for violin and piano, was organized by Haus Publishing to launch Matthews's new biography of Britten, and it was while researching the book that Matthews came across the score of the Two Pieces, written in late 1929 for a chamber group in which he played the viola. Like the Quartettino, which it immediately predates, the Two Pieces shows Britten trying his hand at a Bergian expressionism. A note in his diary at the time (November 1929), quoted in the programme for the concert, reveals the direction his mind was taking: ‘I am thinking much about modernism in art, debating whether Impressionism, Expressionism, Classicism etc are right. I have half decided on Schoenberg’. His music confirms his words.

In the mid-1960s Roger Smalley was a leading exponent of the music of Stockhausen (whose student he became). But except for his own performance of Klavierstück IX (at his piano recital which I did not hear) this early influence was hardly to be felt in the 60th birthday celebrations hosted by Trinity College of Music, London in May. Under the overall artistic direction of Douglas Finch, a series of concerts and recitals presented a cross-section of work from the past two decades.