After an intimate-scale performance of Walton’s Façade a month ago, conductor John Lubbock turned his attention to Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll at his latest OSJ Prom. As a programme note remarked: “The music is unusually intimate and restrained for a composer who lived a life of excess”. Described by Wagner as a “symphonic birthday greeting” for his wife Cosima, Siegfried Idyll also celebrated the birth of his son Siegfried, one day to take the helm at Bayreuth. Lubbock used just ten instrumentalists, giving the piece a raw and passionate edge often absent with an ocean of silky smooth string players. This was a revelatory performance.

The rest of the Prom was devoted to English music, with Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending as its centrepiece. Eloisa-Fleur Thom’s warm violin solo soared seemingly effortlessly over the accompaniment, which should — and did —suggest heat simmering up from a field to support the bird overhead. There was a touch of melancholy, too, perhaps suggesting that the idyllic, peaceful pastoral scene depicted is increasingly hard to find. Vaughan Williams prefaced his score with lines from Meredith’s similarly named poem, and they were feelingly spoken here by Caitlin McMillan — but to my ears, the decision to recite the second verse in the middle of the music rather broke the mood.

More successful in this respect were Finzi’s Three Soliloquies from Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the gentle, fitting, and ever so English music alternated seamlessly with Shakespeare’s spoken words. Very English, too, is Vaughan Williams’s prelude Rhosymedre — or perhaps that should read “very Anglo-Welsh”, for the piece is based on a Welsh hymn tune. Completing this concert were two pieces from Walton’s Henry V suite — a soaring, yearning pasacalia on Henry’s death, and a romantic flute solo (Emer McDonough) setting the words “Touch her soft lips and part”. Once again this was a beautifully crafted OSJ Prom.