It was something of a coup for Brighton Festival to get the Philharmonia Orchestra and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for only the second performance of Davies'

new work The Antarctic Symphony.

It was a triumph. Maxwell Davies conducted his own work which took up the second half of the concert and which was inspired by a visit to the Antarctic at the invitation of the British Antarctic Survey.

It was a brilliant piece of programme music showing the vast wastes of the frozen continent with its moving ice flows, its white beauty, its isolation, its dangers and even its sub-ice life forms.

It might not have had the vast grandeur of Vaughan Williams' symphony of the same name but this was immediately accessible and projected its own grandeur through effective use of brass and percussion.

Maxwell Davies paid his dues to minimalism but came up with some breathtaking lines for the clarinet which gave the piece a sort of inner glow.

This was a mesmerising, almost hypnotic work which, in places, looked back to the composer's previous compositions. I would now like to hear a retrospective of his music.

I enjoyed it hugely as, I believe, most of the audience did.

It was certainly a challenging piece but was never boring and showed the composer to be one of the great masters of modern British orchestral music.

Less pleasing was the first half of the concert which opened with a rather tedious walk-through of Walton's pretty boring Crown Imperial March. Things didn't get much better when Tamsin Little took up her violin for Elgar's Violin Concerto.

Miss Little is a fine player and technically she was brilliant. But it never quite caught light and certainly it did not tug at my heart strings.

The problem was that the orchestra was far too large for the theatre.

The acoustics could not cope and David Atherton, the conductor for the first half of the concert seemed a little ill at ease having too many of his players hidden in the wings.

The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra solved the problem by using the theatre's acoustics for chamber orchestras for which it is absolutely ideal.

Theatre Royal, New Road, Brighton, Saturday