The theme of this year's York Early Music festival is births, deaths and anniversaries, with significant dates for Handel, Haydn and Purcell duly noted. But the most spontaneous performance came from the young Danish quartet Baroque Fever with a programme dedicated to the birth of the sonata.

One of the pleasures of the festival is the quirkiness of the venues. The Holy Trinity Church, with its intimate jumble of ancient box pews facing in all directions, is not the most obvious place for a recital, but violinists Peter Spissky and Bjarte Eike adapted to the erratic sightlines by sprinting in and out of the aisles, trading improvised lines on the hoof. It may not be what 17th-century Italian masters Dario Castello and Marco Uccellini had in mind, but it became a playful form of baroque jazz.

There was a lachrymose air to the concerts exploring themes of mortality, the most macabre being a programme by Alla Francesca entitled Music for the Black Death. The young British choir Stile Antico brought an incredible intensity of sound to an apocalyptic piece of polyphony by the 16th-century English composer John Sheppard, rather aptly written in response to a virulent strain of flu. The Clerks brought a more intimate tone to a sequence of obsequies written by medieval composers, including Ockeghem's tribute to Binchois, Josquin's tribute to Ockeghem, and Dufay's tribute to himself. Josquin's elegy imparts the information that Ockeghem was "learned, handsome in appearance and not at all stout", suggesting that celebrity weight obsession is hardly a modern problem.

The festival runs until Saturday. Box office: 01904 658338.