Marc Minkowski's contribution to the Nash Ensemble's all-French programme proved to be minor, consisting solely of conducting David Matthews' arrangement of Berlioz's song cycle Les Nuits d'Été, sung by Felicity Lott. This also turned out to be the least satisfactory item, partly because Berlioz's textures require a larger body of strings than the five available here, and partly because Minkowski's tempos proved hard for Lott to sustain. With four slow songs surrounded by two faster ones, the middle items needed to move more. Lott also struggled with her lower register.

Earlier, she had made more of a splash with Albert Roussel's Two Ronsard Poems and Jacques Ibert's Deux Stèles Orientées, exotic miniatures in which her sole partner was flautist Philippa Davies. Davies had got the programme off to the best of starts with the opening line of Debussy's Prélude á l'Aprés-Midi d'Un Faune, heard in a reduction by David Walther that worked astonishingly well. Much of the score's unique sound-world came through, aided by the musicianship of the Nash players.

They were expert, too, in Poulenc's gregarious Sextet for Piano and Wind, a wonderful example of his ability to switch from the cheeky to the wistful at a bar's notice, though it needed an extra touch of breeziness to convey its air of gamine effrontery. And they were flawless in Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, in which harp soloist Lucy Wakeford made time stand still in her immaculately judged cadenza.