Hats off to the City of London Festival for reuniting Norwegian saxophone virtuoso Jan Garbarek with the four male-voice Hilliard Ensemble, a cross-cultural combination that produces some of the most beautiful acoustic music ever made. Officium, their debut album, revealed how well medieval motets blend with the Nordic purity of Garbarek’s tone, a keening sound that for writer Richard Williams conjured visions of “tall sailing-ships crossing half-frozen lakes”.

Last night they delved into their latest ECM album, Mnemosyne, with works by two modern composers, the Scot James MacMillan and Estonia’s Arvo Pärt. The formula seemed largely as before, with the choir singing from manuscript while Garbarek, choosing his moment like a latter-day Miles Davis with Gil Evans’s orchestra, swooped in and out with strategic embellishments of his own.

Physically unremarkable men, the Hilliard Ensemble become special when they sing. The vocal blend of baritone Gordon Jones, counter-tenor David James and tenors Steven Harrold and Rogers Covey-Crump is rich, their range, dynamics and close-harmony accuracy all excellent. As in their previous performance here, they did without microphones, making even more adventurous use of the cathedral’s vast acoustics by leaving the central area and drifting all around the perimeter, either singly or in groups, before returning to base in close-formation, just like the Red Arrows.

After 20 minutes of soothing vocal themes that drifted languidly between consonance and dissonance, Garbarek ghosted in from behind the pulpit, scattering bittersweet notes from his curved soprano-sax like rose petals. On tenor sax his use of echo was instructive, the dying notes harmonising cleverly with the newborn ones. How well earned was the standing ovation for them all.

Bobo Stenson-Emil Viklicky quintet, HMS President, Victoria Embankment, 30 June (0845 120 7502).