A GENERIC placeholder for classical music, the Sturm und Drang style is surely second only to the baroque concerto in terms of the postmodern baggage that comes with having been borrowed for endless insurance adverts and action films.

Uprooted and displaced, the theatrical drama of these works can seem predictably familiar while losing the emotional urgency so central to their conception. The B’Rock Orchestra’s concert on Sunday blew away cobwebs and re-injected life into music that was never intended to be tame.

It wasn’t until a couple of movements into Haydn’s Symphony 49 (La Passione) that the veneer of familiarity started to fade into the background of the ensemble’s fresh delivery.

Excitement rose in Boccherini’s symphony La Casa Del Diavolo. Having no conductor allows us to see inside the music because players need to communicate with each other in advance of constant shifts – all flawlessly executed, and no longer stale or alienating when you can see them happening.

Mozart’s Serenata Notturna was a bit of comic relief: smiles were exchanged at concertmaster Rodolfo Richter’s dramatic pauses and startling solo excerpts for bass and timpani.

The seemingly pragmatic title Passions Of The Night was not an empty concept (one of Richter’s strings broke in the exhilaration of the final Mozart Symphony.) The programme noted moments with "a style closer to chamber music". In fact B’Rock Orchestra’s brilliance often lies in accessing the intimate conversational potential of works that might elsewhere function as homogeneous drive-time wallpaper.

Review by Claire McGinn