Lunchtime Classics at the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Sept 14

Ashton Gray and Andrew McVittie with special guest Mario Sofroniou (Tenor) accompanied by Karen Kingsley (Piano)

For some, Autumn comes in with the last horse in the St. Leger. For others it is marked by lunchtime concerts resuming. Either way, it is Autumn now.

Andrew McVittie welcomed the faithful back to his own Menuhin Room series and began it himself with Domenico Scarlatti, the ornate Sonata, K.208, as refined last year in a masterclass with Danny Driver. K.209 was more upright, perhaps military in a toy soldier way but the bigger challenge of Chopin and the Nocturne, op. 9 no.1, brought out more of his technique in its dreamier, more sonorous expansiveness.

Mario Sofroniou and Karen Kingsley were consummately professional in overcoming very limited rehearsal time, due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, not that anybody would have been aware they only met half an hour before the show. Giordano's Amor ti vieta was immediately a big sound in an intimate auditorium and Hugh's Song of the Road by Vaughan-Williams is full of outdoor vigour and energy, Karen standing up for herself well against Mario's impressive power.

They continued later with Alessandro Scarlatti's Gia il sole dal Gange, all baroque and shiny, and had covered a lot of musical territory in a short time after Verdi's La mia letizia infondere which was the grand, show-stopping item with the sustained note at the end a fitting tribute to Pavarotti whose performances first led Mario to want to be in opera. The knowledgeable audience readily showed their appreciation.

Before that, Andrew had returned to gambol in a jolly way through the third movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata with fluency and some panache, leading to Cyril Scott's Lotus Land which was panoramic and declined to wander more.

Ashton Gray's set was genial. One rarely finds Haydn too down-hearted and certainly not in the good-humoured, slightly quirky first movement of his Sonata no. 49. Chopin once again, for me, outdid his more classical antecedents (which wouldn't always be the case) in the lush Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor that becomes torrential. Three improvisations from Poulenc's 15 of them were jaunty and playful, nos 3 and 6, with the more lyrical no. 7 in between and, again covering a lot of music in succinct fashion, no. 23 from Nikolai Kapustin's Preludes in a Jazz Style completed a various and enjoyable mix on a hugely successful occasion at which all was well that ended well.

Thank you very much indeed to all who contributed so graciously. Happiness is said to 'write white' which means there's not much to be said about it, that art cannot be made of it. Apparently it's not like that at all.