Decades before “crossover” became a term of abuse for dodgy classical singers trying to croon popular ditties, the Hilliard Ensemble was crossing over far more challenging genres with dazzling assurance. More than 35 years on, it still is — as a fine three-concert mini-festival at the Wigmore Hall showed.

On Friday this supremely versatile male-voice quartet tackled Renaissance motets and masses by Sheppard, Tallis, Tye and even earlier English composers. Then, in the two Saturday concerts I heard, the focus was thrust forward nearly 500 years to British music commissioned by the Hilliards over the past 20-odd years.

The first of those concerts was hugely enhanced by the contribution of another adventurous and durable ensemble: the Arditti String Quartet. Together the groups premiered Simon Bainbridge’s Tenebrae, a tough but atmospheric work that appeared to take its cue from the English title — Shadows — of the Paul Celan poem it set. Certainly the use of silence, and of strings to cushion the gentle, overlapping chanting of the voices on eerie chords, seemed to suggest an “otherworld” shadowing the human. I just wished that the voices had something more interesting to do. All the extrovert break-outs came from the strings.

Sour harmonies and block-chord vocal writing were also a feature of James Clarke’s Untitled No 4, which used two contrasting Ovid poems — one about summer, the other about winter. That Clarke sets these two polar-opposite texts simultaneously is consistent with his view that music should be enigmatic, not descriptive. I found it all too enigmatic, not to say baffling — though the wintry mood certainly seemed to predominate.

John Casken’s Sharp Thorne, setting two meditations of the Crucifixion, was also sombre but far more expressive. And I also enjoyed the avant-garde vocal effects, surreal, virtuosic wordplay and histrionic gestures of Barry Guy’s brilliant Un Coup de Dés — though it clearly owes a lot to Berio’s Sinfonia and Stockhausen’s Stimmung. But for me the concert’s expressive highlight was the Arditti’s stunning playing of Jonathan Harvey’s 1988 Second String Quartet, which mingled quicksilver counterpoint with quartertone harmonies, moments of charged harmonic stasis, and an amazing stratospheric cello solo, to produce a work of sustained incandescent intensity.

With barely an hour’s break, the Hilliards were back on stage at 10pm with a new collaborator, the immaculately tuneful German early-music soprano Monika Mauch, for a concert that mingled the bizarre and distraught five-part madrigals of the Renaissance prince and wife-murderer Carlo Gesualdo with the three parts of Roger Marsh’s extended 2008 vocal work, Il Cor Tristo. There is an Italian Renaissance link: Marsh sets an anguished chunk of Dante’s Inferno. But apart from one burst of shouted dialogue his music is very understated, very much the servant of the text, always rising from, and returning to, the same memorable little refrain. I enjoyed it, though it was comprehensively upstaged, harmonically and emotionally, by the manic Gesualdo.

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