IT is a mark of the stature of Ryedale Festival that a group as august as Peter Phillips’s Tallis Scholars is prepared to perform in deepest North Yorkshire. Needless to say, Ampleforth Abbey was bursting at the seams for an a cappella programme that was all English – Tudor or 20th century – with one exception.

It is a small ensemble, only ten singers, five ladies and five men, one of whom is a countertenor. Phillips deals with them succinctly. Not for him the airy-fairy swoops and swirls beloved of so many choral conductors but largely ignored by their charges. His precise beat never distracts.

He opened with two Magnificats composed four centuries apart, by Orlando Gibbons in his Short Service and by the Estonian Arvo Pärt in 1989. Stylistically they are remarkably similar: straight to the point so that text is clear and slow-changing harmony, though with Pärt rhythm has ceased to have much function. The Scholars floated them with liquid ease.

They were equally luminous in Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, with some spine-tingling final cadences on major chords. The opening phrases of its Agnus Dei were lovingly caressed, as were the tortured harmonies underlying peccata mundi (the sins of the world) before their remarkable resolution into peace.

The Gibbons and Weelkes Hosannas, the one madrigalian, the other robust, made another engaging contrast, but three works by John Tavener were too similar to sustain interest. The solo quartet in Britten’s Hymn To The Virgin was positioned too close: it needed to be distant and out of sight for maximum effect. But the nobility of the harmony in two Purcell anthems made a delicious closing gambit.

This event was exactly the kind of exceptional occasion the festival should be about, and a climactic moment this year.