Transcriptions are classical music's cover versions: the best bring a new dimension to familiar notes; the worst aren't really something a paying audience should have to listen to. And that's fair enough - many were intended purely for private consumption by amateur players eager to hear the latest music before the days of the gramophone.

A more recent advocate of transcription is the violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky, who began this concert with his own string orchestra version of the sextet that opens Richard Strauss's final opera, Capriccio. The piece is indeed too good to be limited to the opera house, yet the particular line-up for which Strauss wrote it - a pair each of violins, violas and cellos - has a distinctive, rich, bottom-heavy sonority which in this performance, with the block of first violins almost always dominating, was dimmed. Strauss himself, who went to the trouble of writing 23 different string parts when he wrote Metamorphosen, would probably have done things differently.

Heard in its original version, but no less a novelty for that, the Symphonie Concertante in A by the so-called English Bach - Johann Christian, JS's son - brought classical elegance in a Mozartian vein, although the soloists, violinist Boris Garlitsky and cellist Henri Demarquette, dashed off its showiest passages with more gusto than poise.

After this pleasant but bland first half, Bach senior instilled some gravity. Sitkovetsky was nothing if not ambitious when he arranged the Goldberg Variations, one of the most iconic of keyboard works, for string orchestra, but while his version sacrifices some intimacy and focus, it brings the intricacies and playfulness of Bach's many-layered writing intriguingly to the fore. Sitkovetsky joined the orchestra for this, as lead violinist and as one of a quartet of soloists whose glassy, distant playing made the return of the initial theme at the end properly haunting.