The Cardinall's Musick, Christ Church, Spitalfields, London

After a preliminary lunchtime rampage by Gregori Schechter's Klezmer Festival Band, this year's Spitalfields Festival got underway with a jubilant peal of "London Surprise Major" by the Society of Royal Cumberland Youths from the belfry of Hawksmoor's gauntly grand Christ Church. Later, within, things started with a concert of 16th- and 20th-century English and Scottish choral music from Andrew Carwood's choir, The Cardinall's Musick.

Evidently, that engaging composer-animateur Jonathan Dove – the festival's latest artistic director – was going to sustain its tradition of diversity to the hilt, with an emphasis this year on Spitalfields' Jewish heritage, but also with a vast array of other goodies, from music hall cabaret to what may prove some very canny new commissions.

The subtext to Carwood's programme was the culture clash of Tudor and Stuart and its long-term reverberations. So we started with William Byrd's Mass for Five Voices – a subversive work in itself, since its publication under plain covers was evidently intended for secret celebration by recusant Catholic households – interspersed with plainchant, some of it exquisitely finespun, from the liturgy for the Feast of St Margaret of Scotland. Carwood's courageous recording of the complete William Byrd Edition, now at halfway point on ASV, has opened new perspectives on the output, and this live reading rarely disappointed in its energy, flow and sensitive pointing of detail. Only the bright, straight tone of the sopranos occasionally took on an edge in the stony acoustic.

There was more Byrd in the second half, with the touching "Ave verum corpus" assigned to just four solo voices to maximise contrast with the ensuring splendour of the no less than 19-part motet "O bone Jesu" by the Renaissance Scottish composer Robert Carver. With its intricate textures and blazing chordal apostrophes, the piece was a real thrill.

The moderns were represented by John Tavener's evensong setting The Call, characteristically repeating a few simple phrases over an eternal drone, and James MacMillan's Mairi, an equally characteristic piling up of ecstatic textures to the point of kitsch. The pair of them raised, yet again, the question of why composers of the spiritual tendency seem so reluctant these days to commit themselves to genuine, inventive counterpoint.

As indeed, Holst did in the brief, almost Byrd-like "Nunc dimittis" he composed for Westminster Cathedral in 1915 – an example of a composer submerging his own personality in tradition (as Tavener has always advocated) to match the beautiful Tallis setting of the nocturnal chant "Te lucis ante terminum" that The Cardinall's Music offered as encore.

The festival continues until 28 June (020-7377 1362)