ONE of the joys of the Triple Concert is that for one glorious evening we get the run of the place. The audience, in three groups, floats around inside Castle Howard – still the home of considerable treasures – and, during the interval, outside in its lawns and gardens. It makes a perfect end to a summer’s day.

Anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms at the absence of Stile Antico from this year’s York Early Music Festival had them amply requited by the group’s Tudor music for the late-night service of compline, given in the Chapel. The 12 voices went straight into a velvet stride in Byrd’s ‘I lay me down’. His six-voice ‘Miserere mihi’ cleverly preceded Tallis’s even more florid version for seven voices. Both were impeccably tuned.

There were fleeting moments when the weight of the three sopranos was a touch strident for this intimate venue, but none in Taverner’s extended antiphon ‘Ave Dei Patris filia’, which provided a glorious finale.

The marble statuary in the Great Hall made an ideal backdrop for Psappha’s account of the 25-year-old Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night). There was a mounting sense of urgency as the group traversed the constantly shifting terrain of the minor-key sections. When we reached the major, the catharsis was palpable, and the muted coda was wonderfully diaphanous.

The Long Gallery was the scene of Stravinsky’s dance ‘burlesque’ Petrushka, in the composer’s own piano duet version, whose percussive rhythms represent both the puppet of the title and choreographic needs (originally those of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes). Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen sustained an extraordinary athleticism in their ultra-crisp, dry chording. Pianistic drama does not come more exciting than this. They had to do it three times in one evening – and this was the third!