'An Oxford Elegy? I think I last heard it performed live in 1960," one music lover said to another before the concert began. It's been one of the achievements of the first English Music Festival that Em Marshall, its artistic director, has succeeded in programming so much little-known repertoire. Vaughan Williams set An Oxford Elegy in 1947-9, to words drawn from Matthew Arnold's poems Thyrsis and The Scholar Gypsy. It's a lyrical work, with spoken words laid on top of a romantic orchestral and choral backing: "That sweet city with her dreaming spires; she needs not summer for beauty's heightening," evokes an Oxford far removed from the present-day horrors of the Green Road roundabout. It's easy for a choir and orchestra to drown a solo speaker, but conductor Hilary Davan Wetton kept the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and the City of London Choir well under control as an incisive, discreetly amplified, Jeremy Irons delivered the verse with considerable feeling and relish.

The choir was also at work at the beginning of the concert, when it performed Holst's setting of Psalms 86 and 148. Holst was no Stanford when it came to church music, but he applied much imagination to this score nonetheless, ranging from the light as a feather accompaniment at the start of Psalm 86 to the really uplifting fortissimo climaxes in Psalm 148 - here delivered with great gusto by the City of London Choir.

Two orchestral pieces completed the evening, one rare, the other a staple of the English repertoire. Samuel Wesley was described during his lifetime as: "The dread of all wives and regular families", and is largely ignored in favour of his son, Samuel Sebastian. Wesley senior was represented by his Symphony in E Flat, a genial and tuneful work which seems to owe quite a bit to William Boyce. Finally, Hilary Davan Wetton led the MKCO through a really explosive account of Britten's Simple Symphony - the players looked quite relieved to have got through the pizzicato section with no strings broken.