Before embarking on their annual tour - this time, spent negotiating pitchers of sangria in Barcelona - DUSO and DUCO gave two concerts, on consecutive evenings, in Castle's Great Hall at the close of last term. If you didn't go, you appear to have missed something…

The first concert, given by DUSO and conducted by Peter Edwards, began with Rimsky Korsakov's Russian Festival Overture - a strange piece intimating, with remarkable economy, the richness of his later music - which captured a sense of Slavonic lyricism whilst eschewing moments of rampant sentimentality.

A similar sense of timbral resourcefulness was evident in Matthew Keegan-Phipps' Conception, receiving its first performance that night. With an elastic orchestral palette, this work displayed ingenuity and intelligence. If the climax felt a mite premature, then this could be put down to its seeming brevity.

I have a tendency to think of Stanford as an ossified Victorian composer responsible for screeds of self-indulgent twaddle yet - although this is largely true - the beauty of his instrumental music is considerable: particularly his Clarinet Concerto of which clarinettist Jeni Morley gave an assured, intimate and subtle performance communicating its exquisite autumnal sonorities.

Cinderella loomed over the second half in a performance of Sergei Prokovieff and Eric Coates' orchestral suites. Sadly, for DUSO, the Prokovieff proved too much: rough edges abounded in a sloppy performance lacking the spark and subtlety of the first half. Resulting in the acclamation of Eric Coates as a symbol of high Art, various DUSO members pleaded for hush from the Castle bar, directly below the Great Hall, who had provided various toe-curling ambient intrusions throughout the evening. From what I remember, the ensuing performance of Coates' Cinderella Suite was deliciously schmaltzy.

Castle's Great Hall is queer: it's deceptively small and comes with a poor acoustic, despite charming pictures of the not-so great and good. As such, I was interested to hear how the Chamber Orchestra's performance of Tschaikovsky's swirling Sleeping Beauty Overture would fare in such a modest venue. Dogged with poor tuning and imbalanced orchestral textures the boxed-in acoustic - made worse by yet more muffled sounds from the bar below (though this time, the sensual tones of Lady G) - militated against my and my neighbour's enjoyment of it.

Faure's Dolly Suite and Bizet's Jeux d'Enfants - crystalline orchestral miniatures of wit and whimsy, which despite being conducted by Paul West with sympathy and verve, suffered from a similar sense fatigue - framed a rare performance of Finzi's Lo the Full Final Sacrifice for choir and orchestra. In joining the Chamber Orchestra, the University Chamber Choir conducted by its director Oliver Piper, captured the stoic elegance of the work with seeming ease and conviction.

Curiously, this tone of intimacy marked out a sea change during the evening bringing a potentially tedious performance of Schubert's Symphony No. 8 (famously unfinished) out of a possible trough of mediocrity and onto a higher plane of excellence. For me, this was the highlight of two evenings spent listening to DUOS' offerings. I can't speak too highly of the Chamber Orchestra and Paul West's performance of this piece: everything was there - pacing, a tight sense of ensemble unity, refinement of Schubert's delicate rhythmic and melodic contours, a communication of the piece's fragmentary subtly at every moment within the piece...I shan't go on, but suffice it to say I went home happy, after a pint.

Douglas Bertram