Two events ripe with springtime possibilities enlivened the York Spring Festival of New Music, a York University enterprise, which covered five days last week.

The very name Mountaineering Club Orchestra conjures visions. A group of alphornists? Perhaps they yodel. Ethnic Nepalese instruments? None of these. This being the group’s debut, they took their name from Nansen’s crossing of the Greenland ice cap in 1888, also a first. They turned out to be a string quartet, piano, guitar, and some innocuous electronics, with a brass quintet adding colour at the end.

Composer-conductor Tom Adams had concocted A Start on Such a Night is Full of Promise, an eight-section piece inspired by the explorer’s diaries. His approach was gentle, very tonal and largely minimalist. Some detail crept into the piano (the ever-present Joel Hughes) in Christmas at Godthaab. But otherwise these were dreamy collages, with brief climaxes, pleasing enough if verging on the flimsy.

Ballet Bewegung (German: motion) is an adventurous ballet group based in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Its seven dancers moved with grace and purpose, stretching their classical training – sometimes en pointe - into more modern idioms.

Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio, played upstage, provided the backdrop for insights into the rigours of ballet training, choreographed by Jane Keenan.

The dancers’ own Contrasts, accompanied by Bartok’s eponymous trio, explored personal freedom with commedia dell’arte undertones. Paul Keenan’s quartet Cloudscapes (1996) evoked wistful curling and uncurling. The group’s sense of mission was catching.