RYEDALE Festival opens tomorrow with a splash and a world premiere at St Peter’s Church in Norton.

The Ryedale Festival Community Opera, Benjamin Britten’s Noyes Fludde, will be preceded at 7pm by Ryedale Concerto, a new piano work by festival composer-in-residence Cheryl Frances-Hoad, inspired by the landscapes of Ryedale.

Led by director Em Whitfield Brooks, 150 children and amateur musicians from all over Ryedale will join up with professional soloists and students from Chetham’s School to perform Britten’s account of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark.

Cheryl has a further engagement at the festival’s Day Of English Music on July 20 at Duncombe Park, where she will speak informally about her life as a composer and the influence of Britten on her work, in The Saloon at 6pm.

The day also features Saloon concerts by violinist Andrej Bielow, mezzo soprano Wendy Dawn Thompson and pianist Christopher Glynn, the festival director, performing pieces by Elgar and Walton at 11am; clarinet player Mark Simpson and pianist Richard Uttley, at 3.30pm; and soprano Rowan Pierce, tenor Thomas Hobbs and pianist Christopher Glynn’s 8pm programme of Purcell, Britten, Vaughan Willams, Elgar, Flanders and Swann and Noel Coward.

Promising Yorkshire and Humber talent aged eight to 18 will play at Helmsley Arts Centre at 11am on Saturday in the Yorkshire Young Musicians concert with pianist Benjamin Powell. The Ryedale Festival Opera, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, will be staged by director Nina Brazier at the Ampleforth College Theatre on Saturday at 6pm and Sunday at 7pm.

Box Tale Soup presents Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, created and adapted by company members Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers with paper puppets, handmade costumes, props and playful humour, at the Galtres Centre, Easingwold, on Sunday at 3pm.

“We have three essential ingredients: our audience, our suitcases and ourselves,” say the minimalist theatre duo.

The choir of New College, Oxford, marks the 100th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth in their Before Britten And After concert at St Mary’s Church, Lastingham, on Sunday at 8pm.

Jazz singer Claire Martin and pianist Joe Stilgoe dedicate an evening to the songs of George Gershwin at the Saloon, Duncombe Park, on Tuesday at 8pm. Ryedale writer Martin Vander Weyer will join them in A Gershwin Celebration to read reflections on the songs.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician of the Year, Laura van der Heijden, will be the soloist for Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 1 in the European Union Chamber Orchestra’s 8pm concert at Pickering Parish Church on Wednesday.

Sibling pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque focus on French and American music in Thursday’s concert at St Peter’s Church, Norton (please note the change of venue from Sledmere House). The 8pm programme includes Philip Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos, a work composed for the sisters.

The Ryedale Festival Friends’ Tea Party at Sheriff Hutton Village Hall on July 21 at 3pm features an informal concert by the Szymanowski Quartet, two days after the quartet plays St Michael’s Church, Malton, next Friday at 8pm.

The Orchestra of Opera North and Ryedale Festival Chorus’s gala concert at Ampleforth Abbey on July 21 at 8pm features Saint-Saens’s “Organ” Symphony No 3 and Mozart’s Requiem in D minor.

The Double Concert on July 22 at 7pm is split between Sledmere House and St Mary’s Church, Sledmere. The Szymanowski Quartet and Fitzwilliam Quartet play in the house; Genesis Sixteen, with conductor Eamonn Dougan, in the church. The concerts are repeated, the audiences changing places after a picnic interval.

The festival’s Triple Concert takes place at Castle Howard at 7pm on July 25 when the Szymanowski Quartet and Christopher Glynn play in the Long Gallery; soprano Grace Davidson, counter-tenor Tim Mead and the Fitzwilliam Quartet in the Chapel; and Dutch recorder virtuoso Erik Bosgraaf and Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani in the Great Hall. Again, each concert will be repeated three times, the audience rotating between performances.

Very few tickets remain for the 11am coffee concerts by James Turnbull, oboe, and Libby Burgess, piano, at St Mary’s Church, Lastingham, on July 22; Chichi Nwanoku, double bass, and Christopher Glynn, piano, at St Mary’s Priory, Old Malton, on July 24 ; and the Budapest guitar duo, The Katona Twins, at St Mary’s Church (yet another St Mary’s!), Birdsall, on July 26.

For something completely different, the Ryecrawl magical, musical mystery tour returns on July 23, when the coaches depart from Eastgate car park in Pickering at 9.30am for a day of short concerts and surprises that will end at 5pm.

Steven Isserlis, cello, and Sam Haywood, piano, give a candlelit concert at 8pm at St Mary’s Church, Old Malton, on July 24; trumpet player Alison Balsom, twice named Female Artist of the Year at the Classic BRIT Awards, presents an 8pm programme of royal music with The English Concert orchestra in The Kings And Queens Of Handel And Purcell at St Peter’s Church, Norton, on July 26.

Ewan Easton will play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight Of The Bumblebees on a tuba at Kirkbymoorside Brass Band’s 3pm concert on July 27 at All Saints Church, Helmsley.

That night, at 8pm, actress Patricia Routledge will be Facing The Music in conversation with the Independent’s chief music critic, Edward Seckerson at the Kirk Theatre, Pickering. Patricia will discuss her lesser-known career as a Tony and Olivier Award-winning singer in musical theatre.

The festival concludes on July 28 with the Final Gala Concert by the Northern Sinfonia and the Szymanowski Quartet, featuring the world premiere of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s The Dreams That Fly From Me, at Hovingham Hall at 7pm.

Artistic director Christopher Glynn says: “We welcome many exciting performers, internationally acclaimed soloists, orchestras and choirs to Ryedale, while our popular series of coffee concerts is at the heart of the festival. We’re also delighted that for the first time several concerts will be recorded for broadcast by BBC Radio 3.”

• For tickets, visit ryedalefestival.co.uk or phone 01751 475777.