Wye Valley Music, the local music organisation, doesn’t actually perform music, but it knows people who do, and brings to venues at Monmouth, Chepstow, Ross-on-Wye and St Briavels some talented and specialist musical performers. On Sunday Wye Valley Music brought along to St Mary’s Church, St Briavels, two rising musical stars, Tomos Boyles (piano) and Ewan Millar (oboe) to perform some baroque, evocative and romantic pieces, adapted by the performers for the event from earlier texts. It was an interesting but perhaps unconventional programme of classical music.

Wye Valley Music supports great music of many different kinds, so are not confined by conventional views of what classical music is. Music in sleazy night clubs in pre-war Germany, reviving works of lesser known composers, adaptations of existing works, all can be considered for performance, and are invoked for the distinctive Wye Valley Music concerts.

There was some Gloucestershire influence in the concert programme. Gerard Finzi worked with the Gloucestershire composers Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, and indeed he saved Gurney’s collected works when he (Gurney) was confined to a mental hospital for the last years of his life. Finzi’s baroque fantasy ‘Interlude’ was his contribution to the concert.

Further contributions to the concert were from JS Bach, whose sad lament can be translated into English as ‘Weeping, lamenting, worrying and fearing’, and who provided an arrangement of an earlier piece by Marcello. CPE Bach, JS’s son, contributed a flute sonata, and there were atmospheric pieces by Fanny Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.

There was a bizarre but appropriate finale to the concert with ‘Manhattenhenge’, an extraordinary musical picture by distinguished oboist and composer Peter Facer, depicting a sort of wild celebration of an extreme sunlight effect on New York. At a certain time of the year the sun shines directly down through the skyscrapers to the boulevards of New York. Everyone celebrates. Birds, crowds, buskers, come to life in this outrageously riotous musical celebration of American life. Perhaps classical music, but not as we used to know it.