Choral church music is at its most effective when it’s embedded in the liturgy as it was designed to be, rather than performed on stage in a concert. The Mozart Requiem works well in both situations; but if you happen to be in a pew, mid-mass, eyes closed and head in the praying position at the moment when the choir breaks into the ‘Lacrimosa’, the music will somehow be doubly powerful.

Two annual summer festivals of music within the liturgy celebrate this truth. The first is the Roman Catholic St Birinus Festival, now in its fourth year. With Ryan Wigglesworth (composer and chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra) and his wife, the renowned soprano Sophie Bevan, at its musical heart, and powered, directed and enhanced by other members of the astonishingly musical Bevan family – Dominic (director), Francis (musicologist), Mary, Daisy and Tess – this will be a Thursday-to-Sunday feast of liturgical music. It will be held partly in Dorchester Abbey and partly (for the smaller divine offices) in the exquisite, tiny Catholic church of St Birinus – the church Wigglesworth and Bevan happened to spot while walking their dog in 2016, becoming deeply musically involved in it from that moment on. Wigglesworth directs mass there every Sunday, and will be doing so on the final morning of the festival.

If you’re mid-mass, eyes closed and head in the praying position, the music will be doubly powerful

The second is the Anglican Edington Festival of Music Within the Liturgy, now in its 71st year. Held in Edington Priory church, Wiltshire, the festival started in 1956 when a group of King’s Cambridge choral scholars needed something to do in August. Its musicians and congregations return year after year, addicted to and captivated by its liturgical and musical atmosphere. The mass setting for the annual 8 p.m. Friday requiem mass this year is indeed the Mozart Requiem. You’ll need to arrive early for this, and for all Edington’s services (which include choral matins, Eucharist, evensong and compline each day, sung by a combination of three choirs directed by Jeremy Summerly, Alexander Pott and Peter Stevens) because, being services rather than paid-for concerts, there are no tickets and no seat reservations. People arrive in droves, piling in to the nave, side aisles and chancel. The sight of festival-goers carrying their cushions and walking back to their cars by torchlight after candlelit compline each evening is an essential part of the Wiltshire summer.

Professional musicians have told me they say yes to gigs if the gig provides a minimum of two out of three ingredients: money, music and mates. Edington offers its world-class musicians music and mates, but no money. They offer the whole week for free, and for love. In fact, they pay a small fee for seven days of home-cooked meals in the village hall made by the kind people of the village, who also put them up.

It does make a difference, when you’re at one of the festival’s services listening to the psalms, Magnificats, anthems and voluntaries, to know that this is a no-money-changes-hands, pure church-going arrangement, powered by generosity, which somehow works. The congregation is asked to donate generously to the collection, and does.

One of the festival’s three choirs, the Nave Choir, has a front row of child choristers, a mixture of boys and girls from a selection of cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges. For the children, it’s a brilliant kind of summer course, which trains and gears them up for the coming autumn term.

The St Birinus Festival, though inspired by the Edington model of kind people in the village hosting the musicians, is more of a hybrid in terms of ticketed and non-ticketed events. ‘We started with just concerts, then the next year we had just liturgy, and this year we’re having a bit of both,’ explains Francis Bevan. So, as well as the free daily services of lauds, mass, vespers and compline – rich with Gregorian chant and polyphony – there will be a few paid recitals, talks and concerts, the chief concert being a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers on Saturday evening, sung by the combined choirs and period instruments of the festival, and directed by Simon Over (director of Sinfonia Smith Square). Of the concert’s eight world-class soloists, five will be Bevans.

For the full Saturday evening’s fulfilment, you’ll need to go first to Pontifical Vespers in the Abbey at 5 p.m., then to the Monteverdi concert, and finally to compline in the church of St Birinus, at which a Salve Regina by Fernando de las Infantas will be a highlight. The spirit of St Birinus, who arrived in Dorchester-on-Thames from Rome in the 7th century, bringing Benedictine monks and Gregorian chant, and baptising the king of Wessex, is very much alive in the village.