THIS year’s composer in residence at Ryedale Festival is the Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir. She is proving immensely stimulating, both personally and musically.

Five players and two sopranos, centred round the Phoenix (piano) Trio, gave five of Weir’s works, dating from 1979 to 2015. The latest piece was Nuits d’Afrique, with the soprano Harriet Burns supported by cello, flute and piano, a deliberate imitation of the forces required for Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses.

Its poetry is all by African women born in the 1950s. Weir’s palette here was remarkable: a steamy lullaby with Arcadian flute, stuttering piano for the roll of the tom-toms, a rampant crocodile (the cello of Christian Elliott) tamed into a waltz, and the vagaries of village life, both cheery and sinister. Burns’s French was not always clear, but she coloured her moods adroitly.

Slightly less programmatic was Weir’s exciting First Piano Trio (1998), which opens in the world of Schubert’s gondolier, with choppy waters – tremolo figures – in Venice. The central scherzo had the piano breaking up insistent motor-rhythms, before variations based on a whirligig motif inspired by Gaelic poetry.

The soprano Elin Manahan Thomas was a superb chameleon in King Harald’s Saga (1979), “a grand opera in three acts” lasting barely ten minutes. Unaccompanied, she gave all eight roles with wit and insight.

Two shorter pieces, the piano quartet Arise, Arise! and Bagpiper’s String Trio, completed an utterly charming afternoon.