These appearances confirmed her place among the best of living concert singers - with a wicked sense of humour too.Outside the song package, Bath's festival events have included a robust Dido and Aeneas - semi-staged by Robert King and his King's Consort with a heavy hand, but a fine Belinda from Rebecca Outram - and some cherishable concerts in country churches: a gossamer-light serving of English 17th-century string repertory by the period ensemble Concordia in St Andrew's, Chew Magna, and a profoundly resonant event for the Lennox Berkeley centenary in St Mary's, Marshfield.Berkeley came to Marshfield in 1940 to join a makeshift artistic community that included William Glock and Dylan Thomas (heaven knows what they had in common) and apparently left the village in a state of shock. As if the war wasn't enough.While there, he wrote his Second String Quartet: a hard-to-grasp, oblique, emotionally-cool score that attracts the epithets of feint praise standardly applied to Berkeley ("elegant", "fastidious", "well-crafted") but is worth knowing for its small miracle of linear fluency in a first movement that grows through long stretches of involved counterpoint. The piece has fallen out of repertory (if it was ever in), so this was a rare hearing. And it was superbly done, in the presence of the composer's family, by the American-based Avalon Quartet: four outstanding players unfamiliar to British audiences but not, I suspect, for much longer. On the same day as this Marshfield concert they made their Wigmore d?t (busy people) If you missed them, never fear They'll soon be back.

By Michael White The Bath International Music Festival continues until 1 June (01225 463362; .uk). Avant-garde performance artist the Iowan, Rinde Eckert, has been widely celebrated for his multimedia work with the Paul Drescher Ensemble, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. His forays into opera and musical theatre have been part of a self-proclaimed mission to make theatre more "fiercely interdisciplinary". In the 75-minute, award-winning two- hander And God Created Great Whales, directed by David Schweizer - "the PT Barnum of the avant-garde" - Eckert plays Nathan, a piano tuner and composer dying of an unspecified, Alzheimer's-like disease, who is striving to complete an opera based on Melville's Moby Dick. Each tape recorder serves a separate function - one is for musical inspiration, the other intended for philosophical ruminations and so on.He presses play and his voice comes through the speakers, reminding him of what is happening, what he has to do, and how he is to proceed. The instructions insist that he follow the advice of his muse, a mysterious woman who goads him and occasionally inspires him.

The role of the muse is played by Nora Cole, an actress who has already found acclaim for her Broadway performance in the revival of On The Town, and Jelly's Last Jam, opposite Gregory Hines.Clearly indebted to Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape - and its treatment of time, identity, memory and experience - and Brecht's Galileo, Whales draws the audience into the complex philosophical themes of Melville's novel - primarily the function of metaphor - through the tragicomedy of the hero's increasing bewilderment as he obsessively plays and replays back his notes, flailing amid symbols and hidden meanings. Nathan hopes the opera will a conduit for his immortal soul, but time is running out.Eckert, a classically trained singer and the son of opera singers, throws in tenor and mezzo-soprano arias, baroque melodies, Tom Waits-style "word jazz" and Buster Keaton-esque physical comedy to depict the fragmented mental state of a balding, stocky, middle-aged genius who can isolate shards of his talent, but not fit them into a meaningful artistic whole.Melanie Joseph, artistic director of the New York Foundry Theatre Company, which first staged And God Created Whales, has described Eckert's performance as presenting "multitextual layers of consideration, so that his character is fractalised by the nature of the work itself". Like Captain Ahab, Nathan's manic obsession for truth is fatally doomed He is a man who "will drown in his own ignorance". And God Created Whales, Barbican Pit, London EC2 (0845-120 7518; org.uk/bite) from Tuesday. Frequent tours of Britain have built a following for this junior branch of the Netherlands Dance Theatre. NDT2 comprises 16 dancers early in their careers, apparently (from the programme biographies) between late teens and mid-twenties, mostly with some previous experience.

Given the fierce competition to join the main NDT company, and that some of these NDT2 aspirants can hope to make the transition, their performing standard is high. By coincidence, three days earlier I saw a programme in Paris where the young hopes of the Ballet de l'Op?, about the same age as NDT2, not only showed brilliant technique and style but also came over far more distinctively as individual personalities. They had the material to permit this: classic showpieces and a couple of really lively new ballets.NDT prefer modernism, but only one of their first-night works made them appear lively entertainers. That was Johan Inger's Dream Play, framed in a neat "real life" situation between a lonely man and the smart woman who ignores him.