St George's concert hall is a hive of activity this week with its eight-day festival of music inspired by the natural world. Much of the festival – called Earth Music Bristol, and curated by St George's director Suzanne Rolt and composer Edward Cowie – is being broadcast live on Radio 3. Given the subject matter, St George's is an apt venue, with its perfect acoustic offering a pure experience of sound.

This concert, given by the Elias String Quartet with tenor Allan Clayton and pianist Tom Poster, largely focused on responses to landscape by 20th-century English composers, including celebrated settings of poems from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad by Ivor Gurney and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Clayton, with his even tone and clear articulation, varied his delivery astutely in Gurney's Ludlow and Teme, finding the moments of deep sadness yet bringing a blazing ferocity to the line "And never be old".

After three songs by Peter Warlock, Clayton and Poster brought the same sensitivity to the cycle On Wenlock Edge, but it was the Eliases' instinctive feel for Vaughan Williams's ravishing colours that was moving, conjuring misty haze and blue remembered hills. Poster's playing of On the Overgrown Path, Janác˘ek's sequence of piano pieces, was probably an unnecessary diversion, but it offered an interesting comparison with the Elgar Piano Quintet, written in 1918. Here, Poster and the Elias Quartet got the fine balance between Elgar's anguish (from his own inner landscape) and the solace provided by the English landscape. Their performance could hardly have been more passionate.