Vacation Chamber Orchestras,

Grassington Town Hall

ANYBODY who follows the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year and takes delight in the wealth of talent and commitment on display would also find concerts presented by the Ripon-based Vacation Chamber Orchestras a heartening experience.

The organisation’s remit is to combine advanced training for student musicians with the opportunity to take part in professional-level concerts and recitals.

The participants on this occasion formed a variable-geometry chamber music ensemble, consisting of a string quartet - of postgraduate students at the Royal Academy of Music - a wind quintet and a double bassist.

Their programme was characteristically imaginative.

It was bookended by two delightful nonets by Czech composers of the 20th century, the first by Bohuslav Martinu, the other - rarely heard but surely meriting much greater exposure - by his sometime pupil Jan Novak.

In between came a performance of Debussy’s string quartet in which those players demonstrated their prize-winning quality; Malcolm Arnold’s amiable Sea Shanties for wind quintet; and a chamber version of Richard Strauss’s Til Eulenspiegel - an unlikely conception perhaps, but one which enabled the clarinettist and the horn player to showcase their skills.

Peter Leach