AT THE first English Music Festival in Dorchester Abbey, near Oxford, in 2007, audiences were thin on the ground. This year's festival was the seventh, and the Abbey's nave and south transept have filled. English-music groupies head for Dorchester like pilgrims to Walsingham. On every count, 2013's festival was a thumping success.

The festival is the brainwave of one entrepreneur, blessed with passion and determination, as well as shrewd musical judgement: Em Marshall, now Marshall-Luck. The name works wonders: an adventurous "EM" publishing house has been added, specialising in British music (EMI now being reluctant); and a new record label, EM Records, all 15 (and more) bearing an "EM" number, on which scrumptious, mostly unrecorded English repertoire - E. J. Moeran is one beneficiary, C. H. H. Parry another - have begun appearing in faultless recordings (www.em-records.com).

One of the most talented performers, in the festival and on the label alike, is her husband, the young violin virtuoso Rupert Marshall-Luck. Others lend unstinting support: the conductor Hilary Davan Wetton galvanised the choral side of the programme; the composer-pianist David Owen Norris, who recently revived his engaging commemorative oratorio Prayerbook (now recorded on EMR CD010), composed a new Symphony, a clever fusion of wit, pastiche, and seriousness, and devilish devices, for this year's festival.

Festival vice-presidents include Terry Waite, who furnished the awesomely well-produced and amply noted programme-book's introduction this year, a moving recollection of how Elgar provided a transformative moment in his harsh imprisoned fortunes. The actor Jeremy Irons lends crucial support. Patrick Stewart, Michael Kennedy, Brian Kay, and Sir Roger Norrington, the last of whom was in evidence, supporting his electrifying conducting pupil Ben Palmer.

Palmer felt his way with assurance through a warren of new orchestral works: from Richard Blackford, a joyous overture, Spirited, with Copland-like trumpet and horn calls; then Philip Lane, Paul Carr, and, not least, Palmer himself, with quite a reedy, intense Sinfoni- etta. But, among them, Christopher Wright, with his mysterious Legend, evoking a Suffolk coast that Benjamin Britten would have known well, stood out.

The world première of Norris's Symphony, clever in construction, if less impudent than expected, with his Orlando Gibbons-like melody increasingly boldly proclaimed, brought the most sparkle and sheer musical panache to that packed evening.

Nevertheless, it was Britten's former amanuensis David Matthews, 70 this year, who showed what a really top-league composer's mettle is like: White Nights, one of his riveting tone poems, unveiled a dark underbelly of personalrecollection, Dostoevsky novella, and Bresson film imagery amid mesmerising scattered ostinati and orchestration such as only Matthews can do. For violin and orchestra (Marshall-Luck again superbly alluring), the work has been morphed by the composer into a full-length violin concerto: from the concentration, you can feel why.

While chamber music prevails by day, one looks forward with eagerness to choral music that shows equally fresh, imaginitive planning. Yet, for good reason, that must wait; for one composer whom one inevitably associates with choral works is the Oswestry-born Sir Henry Walford Davies, boy chorister and then indented assistant organist at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Famous for his Solemn Melody, he became, only seven years before his death in 1941, Elgar's successor as Master of the King's Musick. Here he confounded at least me.

We heard Walford Davies's Second Symphony, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Brit-ish music's most ardent champion, Martin Yates - only last year Yates gave us, on the Dutton label (CDLX 7281), with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the completed sketches of E. J. Moeran's Second Symphony, like the present work never heard before, and evidently a masterpiece.

You could hear some tut-tutting - "maybe", "old fool", "so-so", or "we never expected much" as some of the audience came out after the Walford Davies. But I thought it a fine work: obviously backward-looking, but striking in many respects for its 1910 date, colourfully orchestrated, varied, and periodically achieving a profundity of almost Brucknerian nobility.

This was the first performance ever of the full orchestral score: the sort of achievement that this festival achieves manages time and again by sheer courage. Ralph Vaughan Williams's symphonic poem The Solent, heard before it, seemed a bit of a squib; but his 1898 Serenade is sensational, as experts like Lewis Foreman point out: to my ear, it joins Parry and Stanford in rewriting the map of turn-of-the-century English music.

Sadly, a case for George Dyson's choral Three Hymns, which suffer from some banal word-setting of Robert Herrick and George Herbert, could not really be made out. "Lauds", the central poem of the triptych, with words by the mid-Tudor George Gascoigne (c.1535-77) - "Ye that have spent the silent night . . ." - in Stanford/Elgar line, with some quick-shifting harmonies, easily fared best.

But Davan Wetton's well-drilled City of London Choir, stalwarts of the festival, worked wonders with the late John Gardner's (1917-2011) Stabat Mater - especially haunting for the soprano Lucy Hall's Ariel-like high tessitura and dwelling on the agonised cry "Filius"; for the expressive choir words; and for the lucid organ registrations from Lichfield Cathedral's former organist Philip Scriven, especially one wonderful French (Jehan Alain)-sounding organ interlude. Only a slight loss of compositional momentum and a not-too-successful Baroque fugue near the culmination let this piece down.

The highlight of the whole extended weekend, for me - though there was much I did not hear - was a performance of Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, his Christopher Smart cantata commissioned for St Matthew's, Northampton. The voice of the 23-year-old tenor Edward Leach ("For the flowers are peculiarly The Poetry of Christ") shone through like a beacon; and Vaughan Williams's George Herbert setting, Five Mystical Songs, in which the young baritone Thomas Humphreys touched nerves one would associate with a John Shirley-Quirk or a Bryn Terfel. With such talent feeding through, and artists of such ravishing quality, what need the English Music Festival, or the English music scene, fear?

www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk