Capriccio espagnol - Rimsky-Korsakov

Intermezzo from Goyescas - Granados

Concierto de Aranjuez - Rodrigo

Symphonie fantastique - Berlioz

Friday's concert by the National Symphony Orchestra, billed as a Rodrigo Centenary Concert, featured just a single work by Spain's best-known composer of the last half century.

The Concierto de Aranjuez was named after a royal palace near Madrid with the intention of suggesting "the essence of an 18th-century court, where aristocratic distinction blends with popular culture".

Much of the imagery that the composer used was gentle rather than robust - "only as strong as a butterfly".

But today's performers, unlike the dedicatee Regino Sβinz de la Maza at the 1940 premiΦre, generally opt to use amplification. Friday's conductor Proinns∅as ╙ Duinn showed himself fully capable of keeping the sound of the orchestra to the merest whisper, but the amplification was in place to ensure soloist Carlos Bonell's strongly-characterised playing would retain the larger-than-life quality so familiar from recordings.

The concerto was placed at the centre of a popular programme, with Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio espagnol and the Intermezzo from Granados's opera Goyescas keeping the flavour all-Spanish during the first half.

╙ Duinn approached all four pieces with rewarding directness, and avoided the temptation to force the excitement in an evening that had plenty of showiness on offer. He rather let himself down by monkeying about with orchestral placing the Symphonie fantastique, especially by having the offstage derriΦre la scΦne oboe in the balcony for the "ScΦne aux Champs", and completely undermining the echoey remoteness that the composer intended.

But, such lapses apart, the music-making had an engaging sureness of purpose.