The 54-strong orchestra cannot sustain the sheeny precision and luxury of a fully professional orchestra but it produces a pleasing and exciting sound and shows a commitment that communicates to the audience.

The concert, at Todmorden Town Hall, opened with Holst's spectacular ballet music from the opera The Perfect Fool. These voluptuous dances also include beguiling solos from viola, cello, cor anglais, flute and clarinet. Allowing for some initial splashiness the trombones and tuba distinguished themselves generally but notably in the ripplingly eruptive writing towards the close.

The first of two Ted Hughes-centred works was John Reeman's Elmet Suite – a sequence of five atmospheric miniatures.

This is music that is mysterious, heroic and occasionally dissonant. The writing is intensely memorable for the buffeting Waltonian gale that is Football at Slack and the warmer and vulnerably confiding pastoral shimmer of In April. Hughes's poems were well read by Glyn Hughes.

The Ted Hughes Suite by Lawrence Killian, the orchestra's first trumpet, noticeably gripped the affections of the audience. The His Loves movement was almost too public in its celebratory extroversion but quickly won the audience over with an incongruous but utterly enjoyable Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers soft-shoe flounce.

The final Poet Laureate movement with its rumba percussion and memorable tune brought a smile to the face. It deserves the widest attention.

Camaraderie was another theme of the evening. Holst and Vaughan Williams were famously close friends. Vaughan Williams has received considerable attention in this the fiftieth year since his death in 1958.

His Fifth Symphony was given masterly pacing and control by Nicholas Concannon Hodges. The horns were predominantly secure even during the most exposed pages. All the playing, but especially that from the strings, conveyed surge, eddy and flow – a luminous weightlessness that carries the music forward.

In the finale, despite one moment of blurred rhythmic detailing, the dancing and buzzing intricacy of the writing was well articulated. This was a superb performance – an apt ending to a rewarding concert and a charm against the chilly rain falling outside.

Todmorden can take pride in its orchestra which casts a cold eye on complacency and is prepared to embrace adventure and ambition. Long may that continue.