ALASDAIR Jamieson was back in the saddle on Sunday for an enticing Anglo-American evening. Four shorter English works were offset by an American symphony, all by composers born in the final third of the 19th century.

The orchestra took a little time to find its feet but eventually built a nice head of steam at the orchestral equivalent of "wearing white at Eastertide", in Butterworth’s rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, which is based on his eponymous song-cycle. Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves was smoother, if a little four-square.

Not so Frank Bridge’s fine tone-poem The Sea (1911), where the broad-swathed warmth of Seascape was transformed into a scherzo-style Sea Foam, with skittering flutes. There was a good feel to the gentle, lush harmonies of Moonlight, and the closing Storm was properly relentless right up to the final lull.

Rarely can this orchestra have been more unbuttoned than in Coleridge-Taylor’s joyous Ballade in A minor, no doubt reflecting the time when the composer himself conducted it in York in March 1905. It was the ideal prelude to Howard Hanson’s Second Symphony (1930), which he nicknamed "Romantic".

It begins unpromisingly, seemingly bogged down in a slow, recalcitrant motif. But the YSO soldiered on, tirelessly cajoled by Jamieson, and emerged into much sunnier uplands. Hanson leans heavily on the horns in all three movements and the YSO’s barely put a foot wrong. After a tender Andante, the martial finale was a triumph.