RIPON on a chilly Saturday evening in early March is a strange place of footsteps echoing in deserted streets with diners in cosy restaurants on one side and garishly-lit empty pizza parlours on the other, reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting.

Holy Trinity Church is an excellent venue – warm, with comfortable seats, a gallery and a lift. The acoustic is good and the chancel spacious enough to accommodate the sizeable St Cecilia Orchestra.

Excellent work has also been done in developing amenities in the crypt (known as The Arches).

This first concert of the season was supported with a more or less capacity audience, including the mayor, to welcome the orchestra under the baton of Xenophon Kelsey, the highly respected conductor who is involved in a multitude of musical good things.

Prokofiev's Symphony No.1 opened with a sweet-sounding Allegro sequence from which a well-known melody emerges, and the gentle, tuneful Larghetto performed to perfection. The brief Gavotta was beautifully modulated with the Finale soaring tunefully away at a vigorous pace, engaging the strings in some very rapid fingering and bowing.

A highlight was Toby White's splendid performance of the Cello Concerto No.1 in E-flat major, Opus 107 by Shostakovich. This fine young cellist will surely go far in solo concert work. He seemed positioned rather close to the front row, but in conversation later, assured me he did not feel this was a difficulty, and indeed enjoys immediate feedback from the audience.

The familiar strains of Romance for Strings by Sibelius made a gentle and contrasting start to the final half of the concert after which the orchestra was enriched by the woodwind and brass sections for Haydn's Symphony No.99 in E-flat with its beautiful opening and sweetly flowing Menuetto e trio allegretto. The whole symphony was conducted flawlessly by Kelsey and was warmly applauded.

Irene MacDonald