TAKE your pick from two faces of the outdoor concert experience in 2010. On Friday, York Races’ only evening card of the year, starring Frankie Dettori, Ryan Moore and new northern whizkid Paul Hanegan, was topped off by an hour’s set by ska legends Madness, still the nuttiest sound around.

On Saturday, you could pack up a picnic for a night by the Ripley Castle lake with “Britain’s leading female star”, Welsh populist classical singer Katherine Jenkins, plus tribute act One Night Of Queen, tagged on somewhat bizarrely at the end.

A sold-out Saturday, when Blue’s Lee Ryan and Olly Murs and co from The X Factor’s class of 2009 followed the racing, confirmed that York Racecourse has found the X factor for summer open-air entertainment. For 2010, the stage has been repositioned at the southern end of Bustardthorpe Lawn, enabling good sightlines from the ground and stands alike, complemented by a newly improved sound system, ideal for Madness’s “heavy, heavy monster sound”, and, most importantly, giant screens for close-ups.

You could watch from afar or join the very merry throng gathered at Suggs’s feet in pork-pie and fez hats, buttoned suits and dark glasses, giving the occasion the feel of a typical, packed, sweaty Madness show.

“Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this,” bawled Carl “Chas Smash” Smyth, in his familiar rallying call for a night’s Madness on Knavesmire that did indeed go one step beyond. Songs from last year’s renascent studio album, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, and 2005’s Dangermen Sessions covers’ collection, fitted in snugly alongside the usual suspects.

House Of Fun, Baggy Trousers, Our House, Night Boat To Cairo, these latter-day music-hall songs and the band alike are national treasures, and if Madness steered away from their darker works on Friday, it would have been madness for the Camden clowns not to do so.

Ripley’s show by “delicious diva” Katherine Jenkins and the National Symphony Orchestra was the more standard summer fare: a parkland setting for a sundown programme of popular opera selections, Italianate popera versions of I Will Always Love You and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah; a couple of guest spots for dreamy French new discovery Amaury Vassilli; all concluding with Katherine's Last Night Of The Proms quadruple whammy of Rule Britannia, Jerusalem, Land Of Hope And Glory and We’ll Meet Again. Gary Mullen’s One Night Of Queen provided a rock footnote, furnished with fireworks.

Katherine Jenkins is every inch the Forces’ sweetheart, yet the forces would see her rather closer than the majority of Saturday’s audience. Granted, the costs go up, but these shows really do need a big screen, because Katherine is as much the looks and the fabulous frocks as the big Welsh voice.

Detrimentally too, the sound could have been louder and the lavatories were misbehaving.

As the York Races showcases show, the benchmark is rising for these summer-night extravaganzas, and in a competitive market, the complete experience demands high quality all round.