The heatwave may have wilted the audience but this remarkable group of young players looked as fresh as newly watered daisies. The verve and energy they displayed in the Mexican composer Revueltas’ Homage to Federico García Lorca was infectious.

Its central slow movement is a trumpet-led threnody but the outer two are enjoyably raucous with a deliberately ham-fisted bar-room pianist and a tipsy-sounding village brass band in a mid-town musical collision. Not so much Lorca, more like Charles Ives Goes Down Mexico Way perhaps?

A delightful piece of programming gave us a complete contrast – Korngold’s delicately-scored suite of incidental music to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Not for nothing was Korngold’s middle name Wolfgang. Like that other wunderkind his light music combines charm, romanticism and the sensuous without ever breaking sweat. That the orchestra could play two such differing works with equal aplomb is a credit to their talent and the patient conducting of Michael Seal.

Mozart’s own Linz symphony zipped along merrily from the properly spiritoso first movement to the kinetic, but never frenetic, finale. Ravel’s complete Mother Goose ballet showed the orchestra at its finest with each fairytale character vividly realized in virtue of stylish playing from every section. The piquant mixture of strings, celeste and harp captured Ravel’s faux-oriental harmonies and in Beauty and the Beast the latter galumphed menacingly. In a really good performance the hyper-romantic apotheosis, as Prince Charming arrives to awaken Sleeping Beauty, should bring a lump to the throat – this one did.