York Early Music Festival, Taverner Choir & Players, The Quire, York Minster, Saturday, July 4 ENTENTE Cordiale is the theme of the 2015 festival, which is exploring four centuries of musical interaction between England and France. It moved straight into high gear with last Saturday’s sold-out appearance by the Taverners under Andrew Parrott.

Henry VIII’s engagement with European realpolitik began at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520, where he met François I, both monarchs vying to outdo one another in the splendour of their accompanying chapel musicians.

Mirroring though not replicating that occasion, the Taverners gave masses by John Taverner and the Franco-Flemish Thomas Crecquillon. French secular songs were interleaved with the English mass sections and vice versa. So we had the lascivious Madame d’amours and Cornysh’s ménage à trois You And I And Amyas lending new meaning to ecclesiastical engagement with everyday life.

But the masses deservedly took precedence. Taverner’s four-voice Mass The Western Wind takes an eponymous popular song (played at the start) and reproduces it in no fewer than 36 astonishingly varied disguises. His unusual use of small groups, solo duets and trios, allied to some fancy Amens and imaginatively high soprano lines, made for spicy contrasts, fully exploited here.

Crecquillon’s Missa Domine Deus omnipotens, based on his own motet (oddly not given), emerged as tauter and tamer, but with tasteful piquancy in the idiomatic doubling of outer voices by cornett and sackbut. Emily Van Evera brought engaging passion to the solo songs, with pleasing quintet accompaniment.