In more recent times, as the social restrictions on women have loosened, so the range of women’s musical expression has widened. The interesting thing is that this process hasn’t obliterated those characteristics that music by female composers was always meant to have: a dislike of extremes, and a focus on intimate states of feeling and softer sounds. But their distribution is interestingly patchy. Some composers, like the American Ruth Crawford Seeger, the doughty English modernist Elizabeth Lutyens or the young British composer Shiva Feshareki (played during the event) almost go the other way. On a blind test, I would guess their music was written by a male. With the gently tonal music of Dobrinka Tabakova, another young British composer, and the meditative, soft-edged music of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, I’d bet the other way.