Hugh Vickers enjoys a night of French music at the University Church, Oxford

Saturday's (January 27) Oxford Sinfonia Concert took the form of an enjoyable homage to French music, indeed specifically to Paris. Not that Mozart's Paris symphony - a magnificent introduction - shows much 'French' influence other than the unison Tutti in the first movement, which are evidently satirical, or at least tongue-in-cheek. This is Mozart the young travelling virtuoso, determined above all to impress the Parisians with the latest symphonic advances in Mannheim (his last stop). Also to stretch the orchestra of the Concerts Spirituels, which doubtless found the third movement fugato as tricky to play together as did the Sinfonia.

They sounded much more at ease when joined by Tom Poster for Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. This was an enchanting performance, "light-hearted and brilliant" as Ravel asks, and with plenty of the "drama" he vainly wanted kept out of it. Poster is surely a natural exponent of 20th-century French music; he understands the mixture of lucidity and inner tension, and has an ear for the most subtle dynamic gradations. I can't wait to hear him play Debussy. John Forster (conductor) kept up the excitement, making much of the "exotic" touches, and giving the Sinfonia its head in the jazz passages (daring at the time). He took the Adagio, unusually, almost as quickly as Ravel himself in his 1932 recording - but Poster played it with the touching melancholy of one of the slower Scarlatti sonatas. Marvellous.

What better, after this, than to hear that primal work of French musical impressionism, Debussy's L'apres-midi d'un faune. One could only agree wholeheartedly with Ravel in his condemnation of the foolish critics who placed him and Debussy in opposite camps. Again Forster judged the tempo right, livening the heat-haze with a sense of quiet movement. But as the poet Mallarme himself said at the premiere, it all depends on the flute-playing (Si la flute a reussi . . .) and here Rachel Goode rose beautifully to the occasion, touchingly aided, I thought, by the University Church acoustic.

Poulenc's Sinfonietta made a lively conclusion, with the orchestra's leader Mariette Richter contributing to some very fine string tone in places. Unlike many English conductors, Forster obviously knows what is meant by "tres gai"; he thoroughly enjoyed the sleazy, jazzy bits - not so much Puccini's Cafe Momus, as mentioned in the programme, as Cocteau's Boeuf sur le Toit.