The opening of Birmingham Town Hall in 1834 was celebrated with a four-day festival. It proved so successful that it became a regular event. Right up until the first world war, the Birmingham Triennial festival was an immense presence in British musical life, with a programme that packed a huge amount of music, including many important premieres, into two concerts per day, each lasting up to five hours.

To mark the start of the international concert series in the newly refurbished venue, Richard Hickox conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a programme reminiscent of a Victorian jamboree. This lasted a mere three hours, but the jumble of items - many of them from works premiered at the festival, with vocal items next to organ solos and overtures to begin and end the concert - had the feel of something from another age, even if one concert is hardly enough to represent the whole spectrum of what the festival achieved. The spoken introductions between the items, however, made a necessarily bitty programme seem even more disjointed.

Mendelssohn rightly loomed large, for it was his enthusiasm for the festival in the 1830s and 1840s that really established its international credentials. There were arias from Elijah (first performed here in 1846), sung with wonderful clarity by Joan Rodgers and James Gilchrist, and the Second Piano Concerto (from the 1837 festival) was dispatched with twinkling agility on an 1840 Erard by Melvyn Tan.

Gilchrist also sang Onaway! Awake Beloved from Coleridge- Taylor's Hiawatha, performed on the same day in 1902 as the premiere of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, but the later years of the festival were generally less well served than its beginnings. There's more than enough for another concert next year; it's an idea that could run and run.