William Dowdall (flute), Matthew Manning (oboe), NSO/Robert Houlihan

Symphony No 36 (Linz) - Mozart

Flute and Oboe Concerto - Salieri

Symphony No 1 - Mahler

The National Symphony Orchestra's bring-a-friend-for-free campaign for its September concerts paid off handsomely last night. The NCH was sold out, and the new faces in the audience made for a different atmosphere during - and response to - the music-making.

Mozart remains a big problem area of under-performance for this orchestra. Robert Houlihan's handling of the Linz Symphony avoided the excessive weight and opacity which deaden so much of the small amount of Mozart the orchestra plays.

The Houlihan approach may have been rather straight and plain, but it was a decided improvement on what the NSO normally offers in Mozart's music. Salieri's Concerto for Flute and Oboe is a candy-floss confection. Its appeal to the senses is immediate, slight and transient. Two NSO principals, William Dowdall and Matthew Manning, made the most of its chirpy brightness.

It's 110 years since Mahler's Symphony No 1 first made it into a concert programme, when it must have been a startling experience for its first Hungarian listeners - the premiere took place in Budapest.

It was Houlihan's achievement to remove some of the patina of familiarity, revealing the score with vibrant freshness and not a little of the strangeness that would have struck a 19th-century audience with such force.

He has the knack, too, of layering the orchestral choirs with a depth of perspective which allows him to achieve a clarity of internal balance that seems more a matter of spatial effect than dynamics.

This is a valuable asset in the music of Mahler, guaranteeing a consistent textural richness and minimising the temptation to cheap expressive tricks. Apart from some unsettling accidents in the first movement, this was at all times a rewarding and engrossing performance.