This was a nostalgia fest for the Helmsley Festival, founded 30 years ago, which morphed into the present Ryedale Festival.

Take your pick among Peter and Alex White and Geoffrey and June Emerson, the four original conspirators, to find the founder.

But it was Geoffrey Emerson who picked up the ball as the first director and carried it over the try line.

All this explains the wind band that gathered on Saturday, all of whom were his friends and relatives, among them several original players. Some of us, including The Press, were round the Emerson kitchen table at the moment of the festival’s conception, others have climbed on board more recently.

But all were united in their acclamation of the adventure’s enduring success.

Inevitably the music was almost secondary.

The opening numbers showed some rustiness, a double wind quintet with double bass underlay striving for balance and not quite finding it in a Mozart overture. Richard Arnell’s Serenade (1949) sported a bubbly scherzo and a gaily balletic finale.

Thereafter Emerson, conducting with a pencil from a sitting position, steadied the ship. With horns now boosted to four, he took a breezy stroll through the Scherzo of Holst’s A Moorside Suite, before a wistful Nocturne and a hornpipe-style March.

Post-interval pops included Glazunov, Gershwin and Fauré, Margaret Borthwick’s evocative flute in Debussy’s Syrinx (from outside) and a juicy account of Richard Strauss’s 1881 Serenade. Good fun, great nostalgia.