These are auspicious times for the Northern Sinfonia. Its new music director, Thomas Zehetmair, has already inspired the ensemble to play like world-beaters, and now Roger Norrington returns after an absence of 20 years to give a masterclass in high Viennese classicism.
The two decades since Norrington was last seen in the north-east have firmly established him as the British conductor most adept at skipping back and forth across the modern and period instrument divide. The Sinfonia is an ensemble after his own heart - a chamber orchestra with the precise intonation and crisp attack of a conventional orchestra, but capable of playing with the febrile vigour of a period band.
Unpretentiously turned out in a shapeless black Mao suit, Norrington emanates a beatific, Bhudda-like aura. At times he hardly seems to be conducting at all. Working without a score, stand or podium, he twitches through the pianissimo figures of Mozart's overture to La Clemenza di Tito, using one fingertip to trace delicate little swirls in the air, the other to stroke his beard ruminatively. The famous thunderclap opening to Haydn's Symphony No 103, the drumroll, is instigated with an almost contemptuous flick of the wrist.
But Norrington remains a benignly generous conductor. As the Sinfonia's leader, Bradley Creswick, scampers up to the sublime concluding harmonic of his cadenza, Norrington swings round to face the audience with his eyebrows raised - yes, we all think it rather impressive too.
If the textures of Beethoven's Symphony No 6 seem a little smudged after the crystalline clarity of Norrington's Haydn and Mozart, this only serves to add a shimmer to Beethoven's bucolic impressionism. Norrington blithely wafts his way through the symphony's leisurely, tonal landscape. The further the piece develops, the more he seems to enter a trance, as if he has forgotten there is an orchestra in front of him and has begun to conduct the ethereal harmonies in his head.
At the end of this emotive reunion, Norrington urges the Sinfonia to stand. It takes a while, as it is applauding him so vociferously.
