Alan Free and the St. Helens Sinfonietta were at their very best on Saturday evening in a concert called The French Connection, generously sponsored by the Rainford Trust. French composers of three centuries were “done proud” with highly committed interpretations.

Petite Suite is a modest title that may lower a listener’s expectations. Any such listener on Saturday would have the extra delight of amazement at the sheer beauty and uniqueness of Debussy’s music, due in no small part to Henri Büsser’s superb orchestration of the composer’s piano-duet score. The performance did it full justice: I have not before heard the Sinfonietta achieve such rich tone and subtle blend. There was another Petite Suite of piano-duet origin to come – Bizet’s orchestration of five movements from his own Children’s Games album. These pieces are quite original too, and say a lot in a little space.

Between these two suites came yet another “arrangement” but of quite a different sort. The present-day enthusiasm for so-called “early music” (not all that early!) has brought the great masters of the seventeenth century back into full focus for us, but in the time of Queen Victoria the work of such as Jean Philippe Rameau, musical giant of pre-revolution France, was hardly known except to composers who thought it fair game for “modernisation”. Felix Mottl (not French!) did a very naughty job on three fragments of Rameau’s ballet music, and we were given the chance to enjoy these incorrect but entertaining shenanigans.

After the interval, what a contrast! No orchestra: a solitary clarinet expressing devastated yearning, and bursting occasionally into a riot of bird calls. It was Abyss of the Birds, from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed and originally performed in a prisoner-of-war camp in the 1940s. Peter Hill, the Sinfonietta’s principal clarinet, was equal to the challenge and held the audience spellbound.

Follow that!? Well, it took a crackerjack of a symphony to bring back our happiness without seeming trivial. The Sinfonietta has a “special relationship” with the music of Georges Bizet, of Carmen fame, who wrote his only Symphony at the age of 16 and achieved a masterpiece of melodious joy. The orchestra rattled it off. We knew there was an underlying link with tragedy: Bizet died at the age of 37, with who knows what wonderful works unwritten.

Ted Kirk