Imagine if Waterstones, instead displaying new bestsellers and prize-winning fiction, devoted front-of-house to Moll Flanders and Gulliver’s Travels, with a tiny area dedicated to authors well dead before 1950. This is what classical music programming can feel like 225 years after the death of Mozart.

The Royal College of Music Wind Ensemble are an infectiously animated bunch. Opening the concert with Janáček’s spirited and lyrical Mladi (Youth) was a smart choice, the ensemble perfectly suited to the youthful flourish and virtuosity the piece demands.

Following on, Beethoven’s Pathétique was richly expressive, and Richard Strauss’s fully symphonic Serenade an opportunity to showcase a thirteen-strong band.

Would the audience have come without Mozart? The Serenade In C Minor, (written after all as muzak) added little in terms of technical demands or musical interest. The players themselves seemed bored by it.

The programme mentioned the students’ diverse range and, tantalisingly, commissions by new composers. If anyone’s going to shake concert programming out of its calcified tastes it ought to be young and brilliant ensembles like this one.

Chance would be a fine thing.

Three stars