Five minutes into its relationship with the new music director of the Northern Sinfonia, Thomas Zehetmair, the Newcastle audience makes a terrible faux pas. The first movement of Gideon Klein's Partita is greeted with a smattering of applause. This is forgivable - few present can be familiar with the works of this obscure Moravian composer. But Zehetmair looks perplexed and swivels round to address us. I thought we were going to be told off.
"Thank you for your reaction," he says gracefully. Then, interrupting things further, he gives an impassioned lecture on the tragic circumstances of the composition of the work, which was completed in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin in 1944, nine days before the 25-year-old composer was taken to Auschwitz, where he died.
The recent rediscovery of Klein's work suggests that he was another Bernstein, born in a bad place at the wrong time. Survivors of Terezin have said Klein's work enabled them to feel they were still human; indeed, it is astonishing how affirmative a piece of music the Partita is. Its yearning optimism and lightness of texture are reminiscent of the heartbreaking pictures by concentration-camp children on display in the ghetto museum in Prague. Instead of depicting the misery of their surroundings, the children drew fields and flowers. Klein's music is an evocation of this better world.
The fine Russian cellist Boris Pergamenschikow was the featured soloist in a bracing account of Shostakovich's cello concerto. Pergamenschikow extracts a furry tone from his instrument - not fashionable, but not wholly inappropriate, either. This piece still feels so much like the intellectual property of Mstislav Rostropovich that it requires huge force of personality for a soloist to make it his own. Pergamenschikow's gruff lyricism is a wholly individual voice. He is technically capable of sweet, humming introspection, but he also knows how to make the cello bark.
Zehetmair rounded off a momentous night for his new band with a spirited canter through Beethoven's seventh symphony. The Sinfonia leapt to obey his vibrant, unforced command. This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
