It’s amazing what composers will do for a lady friend. Beethoven had just completed his only violin concerto in 1806, when he took a shine to the beautiful Julie Vering. Her only problem? She was a pianist.

So in a few months he turned it into a piano concerto for her (and added an ‘a’ to its opus number - Op 61a). This rarely heard work was the alluring centrepiece of OON’s Beethoven programme in Norton’s comfortable and spacious parish church, with Howard Shelley conducting from the keyboard.

Some forty-five players fitted neatly into the chancel. They warmed up with a portentous account of the overture to Goethe’s Egmont, where it became obvious that the orchestra enjoyed Shelley’s leadership.

The concerto itself was a revelation. For it is not a straight transcription. There are added bars here and there, but most remarkably two new cadenzas, one in the first movement (with timpani only, reflecting the concerto’s opening) and another between the slow movement and the finale.

Shelley took them in his stride, while securing the most positive support imaginable from his band. Elsewhere it was enlightening to hear how Beethoven transformed the violin’s essentially singing lines with extra ornamentation in the piano. Thank you Fraulein Julie.

The Seventh Symphony was no anti-climax. Some early boisterousness was soon forgotten with silky woodwinds in the solemnity of the slow movement. The sprightly scherzo’s trio was nicely bombastic, and the finale bursting with vitality.