IT is a quirk of this festival, which runs until August 26 at various churches around the moors, that the names of the performers are not revealed in advance.

For punters it adds to the thrill because all are established pros indulging their love of chamber music in gorgeous surroundings.

The umbrella title this year is Arcadia – Music inspired by nature. Wednesday afternoon kicked off with baritone Philip Smith in a polished, well-communicated account of Mahler’s four Songs Of A Wayfarer, which were inspired by the composer’s obsession with a soprano. Smith caught their mood-swings exactly.

It was a pity that, unlike him, mezzo-soprano Anna Huntley needed her score for Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. She took time to settle, but plumbed both tristesse and dreaminess well in the latter stages. Adam Johnson offered both singers telling accompaniment.

Liszt’s Tristia, his piano trio arrangement of his Vallée d’Obermann for piano solo, was a welcome rarity, an impassioned lament in the hands of Simon Browne and Jamie Walton alongside Johnson’s piano.

The evening was a higher-voltage affair, built around Bartok’s Contrasts (1938), for clarinet, violin and piano, and Messiaen’s Quartet for The End Of Time (1941), for the same forces plus cello. Bartok wrote for Benny Goodman’s clarinet; the trio, with Jill Allan in the Goodman role, was brilliantly alive to the score’s jazz-inflected high jinks, notably in the haywire finale.

It was hard to imagine that the Messiaen could trump that. But it did. It’s a towering piece, extremely demanding, waymarked by powerful solos for clarinet, cello and violin in turn. After Allan’s immaculate voicing, we had Thomas Carroll’s pumped-up but lyrical cello, equally riveting. Roman Mints’s violin, in the finale, began almost casually, but eventually achieved an extraordinary intensity. Johnson’s piano was masterly throughout. This was as fine a Messiaen ‘Quatuor’ as one could hope to hear.

There were also two atmospheric organ interludes from David Pipe, and Ruth Gibson’s viola was beautifully skittish in Maxwell Davies’s The Door Of The Sun. What a day.