Vacation Chamber Orchestra, St Andrew’s, Aysgarth

THE inspirational Xenophon Kelsey, who has directed and coached Yorkshire-based courses for young musicians for more than 20 years, promised an evening of musical sunshine at the end of a day that would have been disappointing in October, let alone August.

And he was right. From the opening bars of Rossini’s overture to The Italian Girl in Algiers, the strings’ impeccable ensemble in their quiet pizzicatos, interspersed with sudden commanding tuttis, brought a smile to the faces of the appreciative audience.

Immediately evident also was the quality of the woodwind playing, not least the bassoons, which burbled happily and cheekily throughout the evening.

Oliver Bailly, a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music, then gave an assured performance of the Mendelssohn violin concerto, one of the composer’s more pleasing later works, looking back to the fluency and high spirits of his youthful compositions.

This was a well-structured reading, convincingly paced and sweet-sounding, on a small and intimate scale. The only problem was one of balance. St Andrew’s is deservedly liked by performers and audiences alike for its warm, inclusive acoustic, but in an orchestra with relatively few strings, horns and trumpet too often dominated the sound.

This was not the fault of the players, and conductors need to find a solution, perhaps thinking creatively about seating arrangements.

It was immediately apparent in Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks concerto, with its smaller instrumental forces, that the overall balance was much better.

One or two tentative early entries apart, this was an excellent performance that captured both the spiky wit – that bassoon again, especially – and the quieter, more thoughtful episodes of a work that deserves to be better known.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s eighth symphony. Often regarded as a minor diversion in a series of obvious masterpieces, this performance, especially in the finale, underlined just how closely related it is, both rhythmically and in orchestration, to the larger-scale seventh symphony.

The performance was lively and committed, yet balance was again problematic. Yes, in the trio section of the stately minuet (unaccountably characterised as "heavy-footed" in the programme notes), the horns have a prominent part, yet the symphony as a whole should not sound – as was sometimes the case – like a double horn concerto.

Nevertheless, the finale swept us along at an appropriately feverish pace to its bustling and noisy conclusion. The audience showed loud appreciation, as always, that such splendid music-making is brought on a regular basis to this Dales venue.

Andrew Bennett