This concert of festive music also celebrated the birthday, 100 years ago to the day, of composer Daniel Jones. Although his Five Pieces for Orchestra were written as early as 1939, they showed Jones's typically lyrical and rhythmic thrust; in their most intense moments, they pointed directly to his symphonic output. Conductor Garry Walker ensured a spirited performance.

The inclusion of Gerald Finzi's Dies Natalis would have met with Jones's approval, as Finzi sets 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne whom Jones and his close friend Dylan Thomas greatly admired. Its mystical meditation on the birth of Christ gives it a rapt aura, clearly communicated by soloist Elin Manahan Thomas. Her clear soprano is ideally suited to baroque repertoire, though in the acoustics of the Hoddinott Hall, her tone seemed to lack the body needed to balance with Finzi's vivid string-writing.

Catrin Finch was the harpist in Gabriel Pierné's Concertstück for harp and orchestra, delivering a combination of sweet melody and glittering passagework with customary aplomb. The harp's association with angels in the Concertstück hinted at Christmas, and there was no doubting the sense of festivity in Samuel Barber's Die Natali, Chorale Preludes for Christmas, which began the programme, and Leroy Anderson's Christmas Festival, which completed it. Having two works based on so many of the same carols, however different their stylistic approaches, was perhaps over-egging the pudding. But the simplicity of John Rutter's A Clare Benediction, and Manahan Thomas's and Finch's encore, sounded a more authentic note.

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