A CONFESSION. I’m not a fan of concerts of excerpts – popular moments with ‘boring’ bits omitted.

They’re exactly the musical experiences despised by that verbose musicologist Donald Tovey who died in 1940 and who described extracts of works as “bleeding chunks”.

Times, it seems, have changed and this is what the audience wants. Or is it? A concert of extracts from ballet scores opened this year’s Summer Pops, though Phil bosses must have been upset by the relatively small audience.

So what of the concert itself? From the outset, it was good to hear many of these pieces played by a full symphony orchestra rather than the often smaller outfits which have to fit the constraints of orchestra pits.

Conductor Timothy Henty used the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra highly efficiently, for the most part.

A swaggering, even explosive, mazurka from Delibes’ Coppelia opened the concert, followed by a fragile waltz and then the czardas which almost began to run away with its own vitality. That musical bravado was there, too, in the sabre dance from Gayaneh by Khachaturian. Indeed, the final part of the concert was devoted to works by Russian composers and the orchestra, with its new-found reputation for interpretations of Russian music certainly rose to the occasion.

Some fine brass playing in the triumphal march and ballet from Verdi’s Aida was as compelling as the beautiful harp and solo violin duet in the pas de deux from Drigo’s Corsaire.

But did the concert work? On the whole, it did, despite being a disparate, mixed bag. Yet the vital spark seemed to be missing most of the time. There were moments of verve and passion – the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, for instance – but they were few and far between.

So I remain a sceptic of these concerts. On a good day, they’re great. Often, they fail to take off. This weekend, it was the latter.

Glyn Mon Hughes