This edition was led by the extraordinary natural trumpet player Adrian Woodward, who introduced himself less formally as ‘Woody’. He had a number of instruments to demonstrate, including audience participation in playing garden hoses fitted with a plastic mouthpiece. Woody demonstrated the natural trumpet – which he fascinatingly contrasted with the modern trumpet in two renditions of Jeremiah Clarke’s Prince of Denmark’s March. He also showed us the cornetto, a wooden instrument with a brass mouthpiece which was on its last legs in the Baroque, but which was for me the revelation of the evening. Woody played us some Bach cornetto music, simple but captivatingly beautiful, to round off the lecture.

Woody had earlier spoken of the limitation of the natural trumpet to the harmonic series, with its – to our modern ears – out of tune notes higher in the register. He also let us in on a secret of modern-day natural trumpeters: a series of fingerholes which enable the player to ease these recalcitrant tones back in line. This was also a new one on me. As a professional musician I may not have been the main audience for this event, but even for me there was new information and insights.

Woody did well to keep the session moving, despite the great difficulties involved in moving rapidly between speaking and playing. He was helped by contributions from conductor Jonathan Tilbrook and co-ordinator Tom Hammond, which added fresh angles to the discussion. Woody’s parting shot was to remind us that, for Baroque composers, the trumpet wasn’t all about loud, high, flashy playing, but a beauty of sound that came from imitating the human voice, and he demonstrated this admirably.

The series continues on Wednesdays for the next four weeks and are highly recommended. Music Up Close is a marvellous addition to the London music scene, filling a gap by being approachable and friendly – avoiding jargon carefully – but offering fascinating insights into the music of past and how it is performed today.

I was warned to read the synopsis before going to the show, which I did, three times. It made me suspect the worst. The plot is ridiculously convoluted, mixing realism uncomfortably with fantasy, and, even on its own eccentric terms, full of holes. The words were often hard to make out, particularly Katherine Manley’s Zenna Briggs, but often cliched and unmusical when they were. What a contrast with Martin Crimp’s magical text for the recent Written on Skin.

But it can’t be denied the show looks fantastic. The combination of live action and film is seamless and technically brilliant. There is a magical moment of a duet between Roderick Williams (live) and Kate Miller-Heidke (on film), in which the film splinters into a haunting split-screen polyphonic chorus supporting the live voice. Midway through, the characters enter the sunken garden of the title, a magical space between life and death, which is realised in 3-D film. I hadn’t seen a 3-D film previously, and the effect is undeniably impressive, the more so with the live actors moving around the live space and appearing to interact with it. At one point one character splashes the ‘vertical pond’ (which is a portal to the real world) sending water droplets zooming out into the audience. And the destruction of the garden into digital shards is extraordinary.

All of which puts the music a bit in the shade, which is a shame. Van der Aa has produced a vibrant underscore, coaxing interesting textures from a small orchestra augmented, always sensitively, by an electro-acoustic track. Sometimes the music comes to the fore, notably in a queasy quasi-dance music section set in a club, but most of the time it is overshadowed by the visual pyrotechnics.

The future of opera may well (should?) involved increasing use of film and multimedia, particularly if it is done as flawlessly as here. But being modern in that sense does not require an incomprehensible sci-fi plot which simply does not allow characters to emerge or engage. It is a huge pity that, for all the wonderful artists and craftsmen involved in making such a brilliant spectacle, and with a composer capable of conjuring striking and enjoyable music, the whole projected is scuppered by a story and text which should never have been allowed off the drawing-board.

The story is based on a medieval Provencal tale, in which a rich landowner commissions a book about his family, written and illustrated by a visitor to his house. The artist – whose writing on skin (vellum) provides one meaning of the title – is seduced by the rich man’s previously submissive wife. When the affair is discovered there is a gruesome outcome. Martin Crimp’s telling of the story retains the period, but mediated by the presence in the action of modern-day ‘angels’, commenting on and even initiating the action, and by a narrative device in which the characters distance themselves from their own lines by adding ’she said’ or ‘the Protector smiles’ into their lines.

Vicki Mortimer’s brilliant staging reflects this division, with two sections of the stage presenting a contemporary, strip-light design workshop, and the bottom right-hand section the medieval house. Characters move from one section to another, changing costume in full sight from medieval to modern dress. It is striking and effective.

And what of the music? The first thing must be to stress its emotional power and finely wrought harmony, but almost as important is its modesty, never obtruding, supporting but never distracting from the text or the action. The words are clearly set, the vocal lines challenging but not showy. There are beautiful touches in the orchestration – the nasal sound of the bass viol and the glistening glass harmonica in the final scene are brilliantly judged – and the very occasional full scale outbursts all the more effective for being held back for so long.

The singers inhabit their roles convincingly, both in their singing and acting. It helps that this is the second time they have sung it, after the premiere in Aix-en-Provence last year. The central trio are excellent, with Barbara Hannigan as the wife the focus of attention. Her love scene with the Boy (countertenor Bejun Mehta) has a genuine erotic charge, coming from the performers and conjured by the music.

This is a most satisfying operatic creation realised in a brilliant production, directed by Katie Mitchell. If there is a complaint, it might be that at times in the early stages the plot could have been progressed a bit more quickly, but so much care has clearly gone into every aspect of the show that criticism is largely superfluous. This is one to sit back and enjoy – if not to enjoy a meal immediately after.

Kicking off with a miniature masterpiece, Orlando Gibbons’s ‘The Silver Swan’, the choir were immediately into their stride, with precise entries and lovely tuning.  Will Todd’s setting of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is a substantial choral symphony for choir and orchestra, and very impressive. Todd creates a very convincing architecture which carries through the long spans of the structure, tied together by a recurring violin solo. The piece had something in common with the music of Britten – which was exemplified in the second half – in that it was a serious and ambitious piece but very approachable, with a lot of surface detail to enjoy. But there was always sufficient edge to avoid blandness.  The choir gave a wonderfully committed performance in what is a big sing, sounding great in the big, filmic climaxes, and their diction always careful.

The second half comprised Britten’s Spring Symphony, clearly well loved by the CEFC’s charismatic conductor David Temple.  The interpretation was enjoyable – and exhilarating in places. Here we had solo singing to enjoy as well: Ben Johnson’s lithe tenor and mezzo Jennifer Johnston in the highlight of the performance, Britten’s setting of Auden’s verse, in which the soloist is burnished by wordless chorus and wind choir. There was a glorious tutti in the final section which made a wonderful noise, Britten wielding all his forces in a drunken waltz which is overtaken by the children’s chorus singing ‘Sumer is icumen in’ (the Finchley Children’s Music Group in good voice).  This was a persuasive performance of a fine work, and a warming experience on a very cold night.

The ‘Remote Orchestra’ had a complicated set-up. The string players and singers faced away from the audience, watching a giant screen on which were projected graphic representation of mixing desk faders, guiding them in what to play. They also wore headphones, down which they received other instructions. The Aphex Twin himself, aka Richard James, was just about discernible in front of the screen, manipulating the information on the screen and live mixing the results.

As it turned out, all the technology largely got in the way of producing anything musically memorable. Dissonant cluster chords on strings and voices faded in and out, occasionally turning into frantic glissandos, or strident vocal interjections. It reminded me of Schoenberg’s ‘Farben’ of 1909, or the works of Penderecki from the 1960s, so hardly at the cutting edge. And for all the freedom and improvisation inherent in the set-up, the piece did not do anything that couldn’t have been composed and notated conventionally, and lacking the imaginative fire that is James’s hallmark. Furthermore having the performers with their back to the audience, and Richard James largely out of sight, meant we were excluded from proceedings, which were like a private rite taking place for the performers’ own benefit.

The second half was, by contrast, a visual treat. There were two pieces based on Steve Reich’s 1968 piece Pendulum Music, in which microphones are swung as pendulums over speakers, causing feedback at the point of the swing where the microphone passes the speaker. The first re-interpretation was a theatrical coup, involving swinging an entire grand piano from side to side across the stage as a giant pendulum. Unfortunately, the music did not match the theatrical ambition, comprising vaguely minimalist piano doodling.

But the last piece combined theatrical wow factor with musical content in a son et lumiere extravaganza. James took Reich’s idea of three swinging microphones and scaled it up to 20, all set off swinging at different points. He then embedded each microphone in a glitter ball, which threw green lasers across the auditorium as they swung backwards and forwards: a truly spectacular effect. The feedback sounds of all these microphones were live-mixed by James, once again a shadowy presence onstage. To begin with, as the pendulum swings were wide, the sounds were intermittent pips and squeaks like a mad woodwind ensemble, with the rhythmic interest so completely lacking in the first half. As the pendulum period reduced the sounds became more continuous, with more concentration on low throbbing pulsations, often at ear-hurting volume, all the while the laser display gradually slowing from a crazy flickering to gentle rocking.

The finale was, rightly, well-received by the audience, whose enthusiasm drew forth a modest and almost quaint double-thumbs up from Richard James, in whom confidence had been restored.

Nonetheless, it is a piece whose fascination never seems to wane. Part of its success lies in the performers approaching it with the same concert etiquette as any other piece. So here the players tuned up before playing and turned the pages of their music between the ‘movements’. The conductor indicated the beginning and end of the music with conventional ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ gestures. And the piece does create an atmosphere of highly concentrated listening, beyond that of normal concert attention.

Another rarity on the programme, again as much an item of conceptual art as music in any strict definition, was Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique, in which 100 clockwork metronomes are set going at different speeds, the piece finishing when the last metronome winds down. The 15 minute duration of the piece splits into three types of aural experience: the first is a generalised buzz in which individual beats are undetectable; next is when the clicks become patterned into waves of sound, ebbing and flowing; the last section is when there are just a handful of metronomes left, and the polyrhythms of the separate tempos come into focus. This is true minimalism, a single process worked out in its own terms.

The other items in the London Sinfonietta’s late-night Prom were Berio’s entertaining Sequenza V (for trombone), Phlegra by Iannis Xenakis – whose appeal still escapes me, Jonathan Harvey’s tape piece Mortuos plunge, vivid voco, which was stunning in the cathedral-like acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall, and Louis Andriessen’s driving De Snelheid.

Music for both head and heart, concert and art installation in one, performed with the Sinfonietta’s usual rigour.

Next was the Britten, which although very familiar I don’t think I’d heard live before (to my shame). The Purcell Room was not the most conducive acoustic for the piece, but the horn playing by Katy Woolley was very impressive and in places, such as the ‘Elegy’, eerie and haunting. Barber’s Adagio for Strings I prefer in the original string quartet version, but Cohen and the Isis Ensemble made a persuasive case for Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, an arrangement of his Eighth Quartet, being better than the original incarnation. A piece which has sometimes struck me as a self-indulgent self-portrait was brought to life, through unsentimental tempos and extremes of attack and dynamic. The captivating whirlwind of the second movement pointed up connections with the very nearly contemporaneous Hermann score, whilst Cohen showed some slinky hip-work during the stop-start waltz. The fourth movement featured some wonderful cello playing by Andrew Fuller in the unutterably bleak folk melody which is the heart of the piece.

After that we had a light-hearted finale in the form of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, a showcase for the leader Susanne Stanzeleit, and the opportunity for some appropriately rustic playing from the ensemble.

But the highlight of the programme was undoubtedly Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. This was the first time I had heard the piece in concert (being a bit too mainstream for my usual concert tastes), although I am familiar with it from Christoph Eschenbach’s excellent 2006 Philadelphia Orchestra recording. I was carried along throughout by the orchestra’s range of colour and Tom Hammond’s ability to shape the large-scale architecture of the piece. The slow opening was suitably haunting, gravid and weighty, opening out into the powerful tuttis  which were a feature of the whole symphony. The second movement started with another superb horn solo but was dominated by some excellent string playing in the climactic repetition of the central tune. The third movement, picked out in the conductor’s programme notes as the heard of the piece was competently handled, with the tricky cross-rhythms all safely negotiated – leaving only the restlessly energetic finale, a workout for the strings but the opportunity for some thrilling brass playing.

Congratulations must go to all involved in a terrific evening of music. Judging by my recent forays, the world of amateur orchestral music-making is in a hearteningly healthy state.