The diverse assortment of facial expressions on display during the third movement of William Walton's Suite from Henry V was enough to convince anyone of the sheer depth of physicality required to bring this music off the page and into Monday evening's summery, if slightly windswept, drive-time concert at the Oran Mor.

Wry smiles, puffed-out cheeks and stern foot-tapping broke out around the ensemble and only added to the energy and drama of Walton's highly crafted modern reinterpretation of the musical language of the Middle Ages.

And even though the work was originally functionally bound to Olivier's morale-boosting, propagandist film, the Suite stands up in its own right by virtue of its astonishing orchestration.

The opening movement, The Globe Playhouse, is a wonderful, quasi-Elizabethan imitation of some evocative dance-like melodies that embrace the quickness and lightness of imagined courtly terpsichorean enchantments. Piccolos and flutes flitted around their upper registers, weaving in and out of one another in colourful polyphony.

And it was Walton's Suite that worked best for this orchestra, too, allowing conductor Peter Cynfryn Jones to create one or two genuinely theatrical moments as he teased out the tensions that arose from the close proximity of opposing narrative concerns; at one moment, the music was charging and battling, the next, it was softly parting lovers' lips.

Elsewhere, we heard Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela and Elgar's song cycle Sea Pictures, with guest mezzo Carolyn Dobbin.

Though charming to a fault, something about this piece didn't quite reach beyond the outward, highly pictorial references and left the more sombre undertones of the work largely untouched.