THIS was the most interesting concert I have attended for a long time and fully consistent with the orchestra's stated aim to perform music which would not normally be heard in Cheltenham.

One of the items was Korngold's Songs of Farewell composed long before the composer moved to Hollywood to write film scores. Soprano Susan Black succeeded magnificently in expressing the subtle contrasts in mood between each of the four.

Familiar songs, composed some 20 years earlier by Richard Strauss, had prepared us for Korngold's aura of late Romanticism. But there were moments I felt the orchestra needed to be reined in.

There was no holding back the brass section in Shostakovich's Festive Overture which was clearly meant to be noisy and bombastic.

The best was kept till the end and what a magnificent experience Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony proved to be. There was a Shostakovichian austerity about the first movement, but the second sparkled with flashes of the humour and liveliness we associate with the composer.

The jaunty finale abounded in colour and energy and the players immersed wholeheartedly themselves in this melodious melange.

Roger Jones