Oxford Philomusica's current season offers the most varied fare - all-Mozart, Viennese waltzes, movie soundtracks, concertos and choral have all featured. Last Thursday brought two massive Romantic works, played in reverse chronological order but equally barnstorming. Rachmaninoff's second Piano Concerto can probably claim to be the most popular work in the standard repertory; it also has a more remarkable claim as the most powerful testimony to psychiatry, being dedicated to Dr Dahl whose treatment restored the composer's confidence, after several years of depression, sufficiently for him to be its first soloist and enjoy its enthusiastic reception.

This evening it introduced the young Canadian virtuoso Berenika Zakrzewski (pictured), a slight figure in a to-die-for strapless gown of champagne taffeta, with seemingly small hands and delicate fingers. We soon learnt why she won her first competition at three, entered the Julliard School at 13, has awards from Harvard and Tanglewood and is now an M.Phil scholar at Christ Church. That opening crescendo of eight chords was perfectly judged (conductor Marios Papadopoulos, himself no mean keyboard performer, regarding her with respectful awe) into its thunderous climax, and the delicate feathery cadenzas and arpeggios so characteristic of this composer were played with ease and dizzying speed.

The orchestra's woodwind, especially flute, oboe and clarinet, made their important contribution, introducing the themes of the second and third movements, while the full forces contend with the powerful cadenzas of the soloist right up to those familiar final Rachmaninoff chords.

Seventy years earlier, 1830 had seen the first performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, a work almost Wagnerian in its expansiveness, its special effects and its insistence on music as the medium of drama. Hence Berlioz's provision of detailed programme notes, indispensable, he thought, for understanding the music. He was right, since the theme - unrequited young love of mingled joy, frenzy, melancholy and passion - here includes murder, death and a Witches' Sabbath which an unenlightened listener might miss. Frankly, it's a farrago, but no end of an orchestral marathon, rendered with immense gusto and lots of special effects like cymbals, bells, four drummers, and a full brass complement, all under the careful eye of Papadopoulos. Not perhaps the most subtle musical evening, but extremely enlivening.