The presiding spirit of this year's York Early Music festival produced reams of music without writing a note. Ottaviano Petrucci was not a musician but a printer; his invention of music typesetting was demonstrated in a ground-breaking volume, the Odhecaton, 500 years ago. Odhecaton was an international collection - Henry VIII enjoyed doodling additional harmonic lines in his copy - but no one is entirely sure who the book was originally aimed at. Vocalists? Instrumentalists? Cutting-edge combos such as the viol consort? The festival offered various combinations of these, though all in all it was a triumph for the lutenists.
With his aquiline, aristocratic bearing and preference for plucking his instrument with a quill, the outstanding lutenist Jacob Heringman has the air of a Renaissance courtier. He cropped up a couple of times, both as a member of the New London Consort and Musica Antiqua, and on each occasion his improvisations came close to suggesting jazz was a Tudor invention.
The doyen of lutenists, Anthony Rooley, proved in his exquisite programme with singer Evelyn Tubb that intimacy was probably what Petrucci had in mind. Meanwhile, the remarkable German lutenist, Konrad Junghanel, takes authenticity as far as his haircut - a flared bob as favoured by sitters for Raphael portraits.
Junghanel's ensemble, Cantus Cologne, forsook Petrucci's Venice for Monteverdi's Mantua in a programme that provided the most immaculate singing of the festival. The group's sopranos emanated a sound as pure as the rim of a crystal goblet. Monteverdi also provided a fitting climax to the festival in the form of one of Paul McCreesh's celebrated reconstructions of a historical event. In 1631 the church of the Salute was built in Venice, and Monteverdi was commissioned to write a mass for it. McCreesh helped us to hear what it may have sounded like, though the unforgiving acoustics of York Minster did their best to blur his Gabrieli Consort's good intentions. But singers Charles Daniels and Simon Grant cut through the mush to make York feel like a little part of Venice for the first time since the floods.
