The giant roller coaster of the Proms tends to put the country's other summer music festivals in the shade. This is a shame because several of them offer distinctive programmes in characterful places, none more so than the Three Choirs Festival, Britain's oldest, now in its 282nd season.

This year's festival was centred on Hereford Cathedral, which, unlike Gloucester and Worcester Cathedrals (the other regular venues for the festival), is solid and massive rather than lofty.

It was a tight squeeze to fit the Philharmonia Orchestra and Festival Chorus between the two ranks of pillars, and much of the audience tucked behind those pillars had to watch the performers on the screen.

In this space I expected something muffled and echoey, but when the sound of Poulenc's joyous Gloria burst over our heads, it was surprisingly focused and alive.

Fervent though it is, the music is full of little reminders of Poulenc's naughty and sentimental sides - a jazzy seventh chord here, a dancing figure in the bassoons there - which conductor Adrian Partington was careful to bring out.

He took the same care with the evening's premiere, John McCabe's Songs of the Garden. This was a charming procession of "animal" songs, sung by a quartet of excellent soloists and the chorus, topped and tailed by John Clare's poem imagining Nature praising its Creator.

Between the fetchingly lyrical lines the orchestra interjected a commentary that was contrastingly terse and sometimes even on the dry side. But there were moments when music took flight - especially in the seventh song, a setting of Thomas Hardy's poem about being joined in his study by "a longlegs, a moth and a dumbledore", during which a drowsy nocturnal magic stole over the music.

All that, rounded off with an unusually urgent and rhapsodic performance of Strauss's Four Last Songs from Sally Matthews, was the evening's big event. But it certainly did not outshine the second concert, given in that same stark space by just one musician, the violinist Rachel Podger.

To hear 50 minutes of Bach's unaccompanied violin music, played in the proper Baroque style with absolutely no vibrato, seems an austere prospect. But Podger played with such natural dancing grace and shaped Bach's lines with such spontaneous ease that the minutes just flew by.