The audience at the Dome on Saturday may have missed the Bonfire Night celebrations but they enjoyed plenty of musical fireworks.

This was the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) back on top form celebrating the birth of Dvorak, the death of Charles Ives and the whole American school of music.

Right from the opening piece when conductor Barry Wordsworth placed his 12-strong brass section above the orchestra in the choir seats for Aaron Copland's Fanfare For The Common Man, this was a fizzing, exciting and dramatic concert.

Copland's piece is a noble work, in contrast was Charles Ives' Puttnam's Camp taken from his Three Places In New England, which is sheer and utter fun.

But the real fireworks came when orchestra president John Lill stepped on to the stage and up to the piano for a reading of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto.

Lill is a renowned Beethoven expert but he is no slouch when it comes to Prokofiev. The Third Piano Concerto was written during the composer's time in America and is an amazingly complex, intense but highly tuneful celebration of American life.

The final work in this American school of music concert was Antonin Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, the fabulous From The New World symphony.

Here is the emerging America as seen through the eyes of a European and the BPO, not least its brass section, gave it a triumphal reading which certainly warmed my heart.

And to end this third of three concerts of Dvorak's work there was an encore, the composer's eighth Slavonic Dance - enough fireworks here to beat anything anywhere else.