SUCH is York’s stature in the early music world that winners of this biennial competition acquire the same lustre accorded to winners of Cardiff Singer of the World: cast-iron careers are guaranteed.

Ten groups made it to the final stages this year. Standards were sensationally high. Long gone are the days when you had to screw up your nerves at the prospect of iffy tuning at an early music gig; technical virtuosity is a given.

Two groups each came from the Netherlands, the UK and the USA, one each from Austria, Germany, Poland and Switzerland. After two days of preliminaries, they battled it out at Saturday’s finals with half-hour programmes.

The Basel-based Sollazzo Ensemble, astonishingly founded only last year, took the laurels: not merely the overall honours, but also prizes from the Friends of the Festival and the Cambridge Early Music Festival. Two sopranos and a tenor, with two mediaeval fiddlers and a harpist, all exceptionally agile, they brought alive the music of the early 15th-century Burgundian court as never before, even semi-staging a flirtatious ballad. Their palpable enjoyment was irresistible.

Britain’s own Consone Quartet’s finely-honed account of an early Haydn string quartet won them the European Union Baroque Orchestra Development Trust prize. They also landed, along with Germany’s Nexus Baroque quartet, a place on the coveted ‘Eeemerging’ (Emerging European Ensembles) programme. All three groups are more than ready for worldwide exposure.