THE centrepiece of this year’s Ryedale Festival is something of a "best of the best" coupling. Presented across four concerts, audiences are being treated to parallel presentations of works by two great artists at the top of their games: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and the pieces that inspired them, Beethoven’s last string quartets. T These epic landscapes of poetry and music are being traversed by the festival’s own heavenly match: revered stalwart of stage and screen Jeremy Irons and the rising stars of The Heath Quartet.

Popular though these artworks are, this is no easy-going "greatest hits" tour. At Thursday’s concert, Irons himself broached the bumpy road ahead with welcome frankness in his introduction, encouraging us to go with the flow and confront complexity head on. As he reassuringly put it, "non-comprehension should not be worried about!".

Reading The Dry Salvages (the third in Eliot’s collection, conceived in Blitz-torn London), he delivered its paradoxical musings on time and existence in compelling fashion, contrasting probing urgency with resigned gravitas.

The musical response took the shape of Beethoven’s A-minor quartet (opus 132), its five mercurial movements having emerged during the summer of 1825 while its composer was recovering from debilitating illness. The Heaths evoked Eliot’s stream-of-consciousness style by rendering the work as an outpouring of sublime expression, sustaining drama while spotlighting some usually hidden inner details. Their visible and audible solidarity with one another was striking; this was a moving masterclass in togetherness, warmly received by a packed St Michael le Belfrey.