Mainly Mozart; Wednesday April 6, 7.30pm, 2016

Benjamin Northey breezed onto the stage, bringing a fresh pair of hands to conduct the CSO in the first concert of the Llewellyn series. The slightly eccentric programme blended contrasting works by Mozart, Dove, Westlake and Tchaikovsky. Northey has a distinctive kick of the wrist when emphasising particular phrasing, and the alacrity with which the musicians answered his directions created an evening founded on beautifully disciplined timing.

Music is biography in sound and some works more readily offer insight into the thoughts and emotions of the composer than others. In comparison with the dazzling assurance of the Marriage of Figaro overture played as encore, Mozart's Symphony No. 31 in D Major, (Paris), reveals a young man trying to establish a career. The symphony is essentially cautious, but the composer has created a stylish work in a manner that would have been familiar to his audiences – especially the triumphant full orchestral opening. We hear the beginning of Mozart's love affair with the clarinet, exploiting the liquid runs, contrasting timbres and soaring phrasing to great advantage. Barbara Gilby's influence in keeping the strings crisp and responsive to the demands of the composer established the flavour of the evening.

Virginia Taylor offered a sparkling interpretation of Jonathan Dove's work, The Magic Flute Dances, demonstrating her inimitable technique and interpretive magic. The composer explores a charming fantasy – the life of the magic flute after Mozart's opera has finished. Dove creates an illusion for the listener of walking through the spacious sky with the music in layers like cloud strata – now translucent, now opaque, then coalescing into hard-edged rhythmic patterns like rain showers – and in and out of this dances the flute with its reimagined melodies drawn from the opera. There were some exquisite segues between instrumental entries, especially after a flute cadenza followed by the entry of the vibraphone – the kind of ecstasy-inducing moment when such a difficult change of voice is effected as smoothly as breathing.

Nigel Westlake's Out of the Blue: for String Orchestra was certainly a demanding work performed impeccably – but I found it unsatisfying musically. Its relevance is that once again, music as biography has recorded the time in the composer's life when he returned to his craft after a serious accident. And no one would contest that we should be thankful that Westlake did return to composing.

Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4 in G Major gave us Mozart viewed through the lens of Romanticism. Tchaikovsky's exceptional talent as a composer of dramatic music holds the ideas together and keeps us engaged from beginning to end. Barbara Gilby and Alan Vivian were the stars of the fourth movement – Gilby's hand shooting up and down the neck of the violin like some kind of dazzling comet and Vivian appearing to produce the most fluid, sustained phrases without breathing. Surely in the hands of these musicians Mozart will not cease to burn bright as an enduring inspiration.