The evening concert in an auditorium sadly little more than half-full opened with Adrian Sutton’s War Horse Orchestral Suite, composed for the National Theatre production of the hit play based on Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse novel set during the First World War.

The orchestra under CBSO associate conductor Michael Seal, brought out all the varying emotions of love, devotion, drama and danger in the story about the lifelong bonding between a horse and his young owner separated by war.

Not only survival but the search for self-fulfilment were apparent in Sutton’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, written during chemotherapy sessions after a cancer diagnosis in 2022.

The work in three sections – Thermals, Far Cliffs and Life Force – drew inspiration from the Richard Bach novella Jonathan Livingstone Seagull about a gull that decides to fly ever higher to seek more from life than just fishing.

Fenella Humphreys (pictured), recipient of BBC Music Magazine Awards, was making her CBSO debut as the soloist having premiered the concerto in 2023.

Her extraordinarily intense and evocative playing in the violin’s highest range captured perfectly that sense of freedom and spiritual awakening within the rhapsodic music, which sounded comparable to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s popular The Lark Ascending.

Danish composer Carl Nielsen saw music as both a creative and destructive life force – which he demonstrated most notably in his Fourth Symphony written during World War One, and which, like life itself, he called The Inextinguishable.

The electrifying beginning visibly shocked a few members of the audience, and its chaotic driving force continued with Seal maintaining a pulsating tempo.

He also drew out the work’s bitter-sweet character impressively, with the woodwinds and horns delivering an elegant gavotte in the second movement, the strings and timpani bringing an intensity to the unsettling third movement, and the timpani duelling menacingly in the fourth movement.

It was both a release and a relief to finally hear the return of the work’s main theme, marked “Glorioso”, that had been an undercurrent in the 35-minute piece before fully expressing itself in a thrillingly uplifting finale.

Clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann will play and conduct a programme of works by Felix Mendelssohn including the Reformation Symphony as well as his own compositions with the CBSO at 7.30 pm on Thursday, October 16th at Symphony Hall.

For tickets call 0121 780 3333 or book online at cbso.co.uk.