Review: Northern Sinfonia ****

So we came to the end of another enormously successful Northern Aldborough Festival with a concert by a section of the Northern Sinfonia shoehorned into the village’s small and acoustically superb church.

You could put on stage any of the world’s great chamber orchestras and they would not surpass in neatness and crisp articulation the Sinfonia, though this concert’s choice of programme certainly kept them on their proverbial toes.

The innocuous sounding title of Divertimento No 17 was the trouble-maker, for Mozart wrote a work longer and more taxing than most of his symphonies with pages black with notes for the first violins.

Conductor Justin Doyle did not skimp by omitting repeats, as frequently happens, and throughout the sheer accuracy and tonal quality was a delight, the virtuoso violin solos superbly played.

The novelty of the concert came with the seldom heard Battalia by the 17th century composer Heinrich Bibier, the short symphony calling for a string orchestra to imitate the sounds of war complete with “trumpet” fanfare.

Normality was restored with an unhurried account of Haydn’s Paris Symphony and the appearance of Opera North’s Bibi Heal in a robust account of Mozart’s concert aria, Ah, lo previdi!, and, by way of an encore, a meltingly beautiful Morgen by Richard Strauss.