Midsummer is not officially marked at the Aldeburgh Festival. You can get up at 5am and watch the sun rise out of the sea, but there are no solstice rituals and no burning of boats.

But the Longest Day was celebrated in its own subtle way at Snape Maltings. At 11am Emma Kirkby greeted The Morning, a solo cantata by Thomas Arne, in which the strings and guitar of the Palladian Ensemble warmed into their own thrumming crescendo of a sunrise. And in the evening Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake re-created the longest day of all: that which begins with the soldier’s reveille in Mahler’s Revelge.

Back to the morning. Kirkby and the Palladian Ensemble were celebrating The Pleasures of the Gardens in a programme of 18th-century music, most of which was never meant to repay the close attention it received. Promenades, suppers and sideshows would have accompanied much of this music written for London’s public parks. And despite the radiance of Kirkby’s soprano and the dancing virtuosity of Pamela Thorby’s recorder, even Handel and Vivaldi could be formulaic.

Nothing routine, though, about Mahler and Berlioz as experienced through the voice and fingers of Bostridge and Drake. For a start, two major songcycles were performed with their original piano accompaniment rather than in their orchestrated form. And neither of them is often sung by a tenor. The sheer range of Bostridge’s voice, and the remarkable integration of all its registers when on top form, made Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été a revelatory experience.

With Drake both reactive and thrillingly proactive, Bostridge uncovered the anger within the cycle’s grief. The finality of his “jamais” was lacerating — and it ricocheted back at the audience in that “nimmer” of Mahler’s no less grief-laden Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Bostridge is naturally cast as the lovelorn Wayfaring Lad but this time vocal and body language bonded into a fiercely eloquent whole.