It has been exactly a decade since Lothar Koenigs made his conducting debut with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera at St David’s Hall. The most memorable of these appearances have been those featuring music by the second Viennese school, in which Koenigs’s impact has been huge. But tasked with flagging up the company’s forthcoming Spellbound season, this curious programme mixed the sinister with the benign.

In Dvořák’s symphonic poem The Noon Witch, the seductive beauty of the orchestral writing is broken when the 12 bells toll at midday to signal witchery as grim as the proverbial reaper. In contrast to this horror, Jonathan Burgess’s languorous opening flute solo set up a sensuous and sensitive performance of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune. The conductor’s particular flair for the expressionist style emerged in Bartók’s suite from The Miraculous Mandarin; his efforts to colour the grotesquery were realised by the WNO players – who were in very fine form overall – though without the visceral effect this score can create at its most devastating.

Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in G major was fitted into the evening’s schema on the basis of the slow movement’s alleged parallel with Orpheus – his lyre symbolised by the piano – taming the orchestral Furies into submission. German-Russian pianist Olga Scheps was the somewhat uneven soloist, pushing the balance in favour of an overly romanticised interpretation, often emoting in the manner of old-style Russian sopranos. Her encore, a transcription of Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits from his opera Orfeo ed Euridice, was again indulgently romantic, but showed her ability to spin a long lyrical line. It bewitched the audience.