event,” Iffley Music Festival founder and organiser Michael Bourdeaux told me. “So last year we had five concerts over one week-end, the Iffley Anglo-Russian Piano Festival.” This second Festival expanded beyond the solo piano, to include other instruments and vocal music.

The third concert this year highlighted another Iffley speciality: the finding and encouragement of emerging talent. Flautist Louise Maltby and pianist Craig Greene both come from Milton Keynes, and both were offered places at the prestigious Royal Northern College of Music, and at Oxford. Both plumped for Oxford. All this I know because Michael Bordeaux encourages his artists to write expansive programme autobiographies – much more interesting than a dry list of achievements.

Maltby and Greene chose a wide ranging programme, which displayed a penchant for pieces that finish in a humorous mood. First up was Poulenc’s Sonata, composed in 1957. The players sounded genial in the outer movements, with the flute chirruping like a bird at the start, and again at the end, when the notes come thick and fast, like a lark in full song. Maltby and Greene next caught Handel in stately mode in his Sonata in G major, then it was time for piano alone in Beethoven’s Grande Sonata Pathétique, no 8. A work of quickly shifting moods, it’s excellent for testing the mettle of a young pianist. Here Craig Greene displayed a clean technique, well matched to the bright acoustic of Iffley Church Hall.

After the interval, two contemporary pieces, American Richard Lane’s flute sonata, and Byzantium by Buckinghamshire composer Geoffrey Allan Taylor. Affectionately played, both pieces sounded as if they might come into their own if attached to a film or television documentary. Finally in this refreshing concert, there was a fluid Mozart Rondo in D, and a real display of audio fireworks in César Franck’s Sonata in A major.