The big name this year is the popular and highly-regarded British violinist Tasmin Little.

However, her pianist on Tuesday, John Lenehan, has a widespread global reputation without a star profile and has his own recital 24 hours later, having already been engaged for this year's festival.

While negotiating Tasmin's presence the organisers discovered he was her preferred accompanist, as he is Julian Lloyd Webber's, with whom he has previously appeared at the Bradfield Festival.

He is also the first-choice pianist of leading clarinetist Emma Johnson but could not get to Bradfield with her last year when she had the star billing.

Although he regularly appears with leading British orchestras and is a composer of some note, Lenehan's renown is built largely on his activity as an accompanist and chamber musician, in ensemble and solo.

From New York, Washington and Toronto via Amsterdam, Vienna, Salzburg, to Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo, he has played in major concert venues and has an extraordinarily wide repertoire which he dips into for an engaging mix of Bach, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Philip Glass, Ludovico Einaudi and Chopin for his concert on Wednesday.

He frequently plays jazz – saxophonist John Harle is another regular collaborator – and his recorded repertoire of more than 50 CDs includes music by Scott Joplin as well as Glass, Satie and John Ireland.

Also a little Tchaikovsky of sorts with Tasmin Little, Tchaikovskiana, a potpourri which is in her recital with him on Tuesday along with violin sonatas by Mozart, Grieg and Ethel Smyth, an English composer of no mean ability born 150 years ago in 1858.

Taught music and piano by her middle-class parents as ladylike accomplishments, they stopped the lessons when her studies began taking on unladylike intensity.
Ethel rebelled, locked herself in her room and rejected all pleas to involve herself in normal social functions.

After a two-year stand-off, Mr Smyth gave in and she went to Leipzig to study composition, her teachers including two Brahms acolytes, Reineke and Herzogenberg.

Not unnaturally, she developed a Brahmsian idiom and her works cover songs, piano and chamber music, six operas – the second one, The Wreckers is generally considered her masterpiece – and there is a well thought-of Mass among her choral music.

In 1910 she met Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the militant suffragette movement, whose mesmerising speeches struck a different chord.

She wrote The March of the Women, premiered by a chorus of suffragettes at a fundraising rally at the Royal Albert Hall in 1911, which became the battle cry of the movement.

Devoting herself to the cause, in 1913 she joined a window-smashing spree round London, planting a brick through the Home Secretary's residence and was sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison.

Visiting her there, Thomas Beecham found the inmates parading and singing March of the Women with Ethel, leaning out of a window, conducting it with a toothbrush.

A larger-than-life personality, Smyth, created a DBE in 1922, was prone to passions for people of both sexes, mostly women and including, at the age of 71, Virginia Woolf.

She died in 1944 at the age of 85 and her rarely-heard Violin Sonata dates from 1887.

If Emma Johnson's appearance at last year's festival left a thirst for more clarinet music, Monday's 360 Winds/ Tim Horton concert includes a clarinetist of equal technical brilliance, Matthew Hunt, playing Mendelssohn's Konzertstück Op 113 and Schumann Fantasiestücke Op 73.