RTÉCO/Wilson, NCH, Dublin

British maestro John Wilson has forged a world-wide reputation in the lighter spheres of 20th- century music – not least by magicking classic Hollywood film scores off the celluloid and on to the concert platform.

Now in his second season as principal guest conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Wilson regularly delights NCH audiences with his dazzling evocations of stage and screen. Opportunities of hearing him with this orchestra in other, more classical repertoire are, however, scarcer.

There had been clear signs of Wilson’s all-roundedness at the previous week’s lunch-time concert, a chiefly 19th-century French affair with richly authentic operatic adornments from Irish mezzo Anne Marie Gibbons.

This week's venture also took in the theatre (Nicolai's Merry Wives of WindsorOverture) and the ballroom (Josef Strauss's loftily titled waltz The Music of the Spheres), as well as providing RTÉCO leader Mia Cooper with a statuesque and plaintive solo (Dvorák's Romance for violin and orchestra).

There was an incursion, too, into more familiar Wilson territory with the cockle-warming London Suite by Eric Coates, along with the conductor’s own tastefully resourceful adaptation of Debussy’s much loved piano solo Claire de lune.

The massy string tone characteristic of Wilson’s renowned session orchestras ideally calls for more violins than the dozen of the RTÉCO and their elbow-grease treatment of the more pattering of Coates’s tunes might sometimes have suggested over-compensation.

There were frequent aural illusions, though, of a far grander string section, thanks not only to the calculated lustre of the string playing, but also to the diligent blending of subsidiary brass and percussion.

Except, that is, in the loudest denouements, when Wilson’s acute ear for instrumental textures seemed held in exuberant abeyance.