Cheerful, delightful, light-hearted - and yes fun, is how the concert programme notes described Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto.

It was just that - and in dollops - under the hands of Romanian pianist Alexandria Dariescu when she appeared with Royal Northern Sinfonia, before a capacity audience at Sage Gateshead.

From its sprightly opening chords she injected the work with crackling energy, while the RNS under the baton of Andrew Gourlay responded with pinpsharp precision in their exchanges.

Listening to the slow movement with its flowing melodies, one could be forgiven for thinking it was penned by a completely different composer. Dariescu extracted every ounce of emotion from it. 

Shostakovich composed the concerto as a 19th birthday gift to his son Maxim, who had been pestering him to write a work to play as part of his music studies.

The composer, in turn, had been on his son’s back about neglecting his piano finger exercises. As witty aside, the composer included some of the required scales in the final movement.

Maxim would not have been able to avoid them and would, no doubt, have enjoyed the joke. Dariescu, for her part, made light work of the tricky runs, taking the finale to an electrifying climax.

The concert opened with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, which was delivered with an elegant buoyancy.  Gourlay did not seem to quite hit the mark at times with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which was driven at a blistering pace in the final movement.

A sizable part of the audience remained for the post-concert Spotlight, which featured the woodwinds.

In a first, they played three pleasurable movements of Joachim Raff's Sinfonietta for 10 Wind Instruments.