Conductor Christopher Hogwood's concert with the Academy of Ancient Music was a tale of four horns. In music by Carl Maria von Weber and Felix Mendelssohn, it was the radiant and rasping horn section of the period-instrument orchestra that dominated the whole programme, a revelation of the symbolic importance of horn-calls for early German romantic composers.

The overture to Weber's Der Freischütz opened up a world of musical imagination. The music conjured an image of a pastoral idyll with the opening horn chords, a passage that cast a rustic spell over Hogwood's interpretation.

Christiane Oelze was the magnificent soloist in two of Agathe's arias from Der Freischütz. Her cavatina was a heartfelt prayer, underscored by palpitating horn chords and a fragile, halting cello solo. In the scene and aria, Leise, leise, Oelze created a crescendo of musical and dramatic tension that was released only in the joyous, stratospheric music of the last few bars. The players created the fantastical backdrop for Agathe's dreams and delusions: the rustling music for the violas and cellos, a brilliant depiction of wind murmuring through the forest.

Next to this, Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony could have sounded staid and earthbound. However, instead of a luxurious romp through a romanticised Highland landscape, Hogwood's performance illuminated Mendelssohn's flair as an orchestrator. The first movement was darkly sensuous, with its lugubrious clarinet melody and the voluptuous cello tune that prepared the way for the reappearance of the main theme. The second movement was a riot of playful energy, but the finale was the most thrilling of all: an explosion of minor-key intensity that Hogwood kept just the right side of chaos, until the major-key resolution of the final section, crowned by a peal of horn sonority.