I always perform a lot of Britten's music, but this year having been the 100th anniversary of his birth, this steady diet has become something of a feast.

I'm always asked what draws me to Britten's music, and the answers range from the practical and parochial – he wrote a lot of music for his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, which suits my sort of voice – to the more highfalutin and universal. It seems to me that this is music that engages with the English language with an intensity that no other composer has matched.

This year I've performed all five of his Canticles, religious works for voice and piano, horn or harp, in which his capacity to enhance, unlock and transcend, rather than crush the poetry (be it TS Eliot, Edith Sitwell or medieval mystery plays) is a miracle. He can take the most familiar of poems and find more. Peter Porter, the Australian poet, writing about Britten's setting of Keats's sonnet on sleep, in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, puts it well: "He saw that such sweetness had to be made more sweet … the result is paradoxically a purification of Keats's mawkishness".

Britten is probably best known as a composer of opera, and his achievement in this field is difficult to credit. Writing in a language with no operatic tradition to speak of, he wrote the only substantial body of operatic work since 1945, which is regularly revived and appreciated around the world. The range is wide, from a mainstream, essentially Romantic opera about an outsider (Peter Grimes); through comedy (Albert Herring); moral epic on an oceanic scale (Billy Budd); to a profound late meditation on Eros and death (Death in Venice). He wrote a great opera to Shakespeare's own words (A Midsummer Night's Dream), and a chamber version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which subtly unsettles our post-Freudian visions of childhood.

There is more, of course – fabulous choral music, chamber music of an intensity and humanity to rank with his great hero, Schubert (the Third Quartet a worthy companion to Schubert's Quintet as a musical encounter with last things), and his great public statement of pacifist conviction, the War Requiem.

Britten's music has never suffered that period of neglect that so often occurs after a composer's death, but his greatness is only now coming into proper focus. He had no truck with the 20th-century avant garde; he wrote music which, if sometimes challenging and austere, was meant to be understood. He also wrote music of a ravishing beauty that made many of his contemporaries suspicious.

While great art is created in history, it transcends it, escaping even its creator to find new life in new circumstances. Britten's work is universal in that sense, music for the ages to stand with Wagner and Verdi, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. We have heard a lot of Britten this year, recreated in ways which the composer himself might have found unfamiliar or even uncomfortable; but the best is that the music is alive and of scorching relevance.