This may not have been the coldest of winters but the long grey days seem to have been with us for an eternity. It was an inspired choice therefore on director and conductor Brian Wright’s part for Maidstone Symphony Orchestra to open the concert with the full glory of Nielsen’s Overture Helios.

Written when the Danish composer was living in Greece, it traces a full day in the life of the sun. There was a nobility to the playing, particularly from the horns who experienced many exposed passages across the evening and acquitted themselves with honour.

An early Mozart piano concerto might seem a long way away from Greece but the clarity and lightness of touch which Martin James Bartlett brought to it was entirely convincing. Earlier that day he had been in Hamburg, playing for an International Piano Competition, but there was no sense of this being the end of a very long day in the enthusiasm and care he brought to the Piano Concerto No12, K414.

He gave a scintillating encore which was certainly well deserved.

Brian Wright argued that Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony is his finest and I have to agree in its complexity and muscularity, both of which the orchestra demonstrated with their usual aplomb. The third movement danced with a Czech vitality and the final movement returned us to the nobility we had caught in the Nielsen at the start of the evening.

A splendid way to drive out winter greyness – and a pleasure to see far more in the audience than at the end of last year!

MSO’s next concert on Saturday, March 19 will be Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Arutiunian’s

Trumpet Concerto & Mahler’s Symphony No 9. Tickets from £12, call 07817 429143, visit www.ticketsource.co.uk or get them on the door.