Wales's premier concert orchestra evokes old times when it appears at venues smaller than customary.

It was once much reduced in size, but there were compensations in being obliged to perform music written for smaller forces.

It returned to that repertory for the Merlin Music Society in the Blake's more intimate surroundings and provided an opportunity to see its musicians close to.

First on stage were the twelve instrumentalists for Dvorak's capital Wind Serenade, in which the composer manages to waste not a single note while maintaining the breeziest of self-confidence.

David Cowley, the orchestra's principal oboe, wrestled manfully with the more demanding episodes of Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto, whose early restlessness makes the wistful and rhapsodic ones all the more welcome.

VW requires the soloist to fight his corner, but Mr Cowley won hearts with sweet and shapely phrasing.

The orchestra's strings provided glorious accompaniment for their colleague and were at almost full complement for Michael Berkeley's richly textured and utterly personal Meditations.

The composer was present to share the applause.

Haydn's Symphony No 101 (The Clock) is the sort of work in which the old BBC Welsh Orchestra, the present band's earlier manifestation, was almost forced to excel.

Whether the pump-up playing conductor Nicholas Kraemer presided over here and elsewhere was a difference conditioned by the orchestra's greater experience as an expanded unit, or a legacy of revived interest in period music, is difficult to say.

But it did project Haydn as excitable as well as witty, a quality always worth emphasising.