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After twenty years of international success, an emotional close to the Officium tour by the Hilliard Ensemble and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

The Orlando Consort demonstrate with intelligence, wit and style, why they think Guillaume du Machaut and Guillaume Dufay rank among the greatest composers in western music.

The stage in the versatile Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ was configured as an open stage, audience on three sides, and was minimally set with a small platform and a table with a red cloth and a candlestick. Myriad small electric candles were scattered about the floor, glowing a warm, flickering gold.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, the humming and buzzing of post-work Friday-night drinkers lining the sun-kissed streets of Spitalfields, who’d have thought that in the church at the very heart of that lively London area would be a man, standing alone, singing music written 800 years ago? Music from another human-inhabited world, so alien to our modern-day, Commercial Street lives, and yet still

The fifteenth-century French composer Guillaume Dufay straddles the musical boundary between the Medieval and the Renaissance. Working in France and Italy, writing secular and sacred music, sometimes to his own verses, he seems to have had a finger in every musical pie, and this evening’s concert by the Orlando Consort illustrated his pivotal role in the evolution of later Renaissance styles.

Trendy titles and taglines are more or less a given at classical concerts nowadays, but that doesn’t prevent me feeling a twinge of resentment each time pieces are pigeon-holed into a concert ‘narrative’. Thus it was with a certain trepidation that I headed to Southwark Cathedral for ‘The Knight and the Lady’, a concert of sacred vocal music performed by the New Renaissance Voices.