Song recitals do not exactly grow on trees these days. So Ryedale Festival is earning a lot of brownie points – in this quarter, anyway – by programming not one, but two by celebrities, plus a full day of song.

First up was the doyen of British baritones, Sir Thomas Allen, accompanied by the festival’s artistic director, Christopher Glynn. A first half of German lieder was followed by Ravel, Vaughan Williams and assorted English bonbons. It looked conventional enough, but Allen’s insights were never routine.

In tribute to this festival’s theme – the animal kingdom – there were two Schubert nightingales and another from Brahms. Subtle nuance made them all different.

His mood-changes, too, were instant. Soulful, rueful, and impassioned consecutively in Brahms, he had also painted a glowing Schubertian sunset and achieved a velvet legato in his evocation of spring.

In Hugo Wolf, there was a proudly prancing steed and a heart-felt turtle-dove, but plenty of fun, too, with the drummer boy’s antics and the irritating critic, booted down the stairs.

Glynn was with him every step of the way, nowhere more than in Ravel’s Histoires Naturelles, delivered in impeccable French, where Allen leavened his narratives with the most telling pauses and found delightful humour in peacock, cricket and guinea-fowl alike.

He saved his very best for Vaughan Williams. His rapt Silent Noon took us to the very heart of English song, a pin-drop moment where time stood still.