Huddersfield Music Society presented three local musicians in a 20th century programme – except the Handel finale – and with that odd exception it was a cleverly put together and fascinating collection that included some rarities.

Trumpeter Rebecca Robertson, from Holmfirth, studied and performed in France for a couple of years after graduating from the Royal Northern College of Music. Perhaps this explains her taste for music outside the German mainstream tradition.

Her repertoire refreshingly rejected the pompous and celebratory role of the trumpet in favour of its reflective, expressive and occasionally cheeky capabilities.

She succeeded in her mission with muscular, direct and unsentimental expressiveness.

She captured the essence of Hindemith’s Trumpet Sonata. It was written in 1939 and is essentially ‘utility music’, a style that cropped up in 20s and 30s Germany in which a piece reflected a specific event – in this case the Second World War. Its first movement has a touch of Poulenc about it, its second is whimsical and its third is a mourning lament finishing with an ingenious version of a Bach chorale.

She was equally effective in Georges Enesco’s Légende, written in 1906 for Paris Conservatoire students. Enesco’s biographer Noel Malcolm said Enesco was awakened to the trumpet’s “powers of soft and muted evocative expression”, and with unwavering long-breathed phrases and fluttering virtuoso passages Rebecca Robertson gave a major performance of a forgotten masterpiece.

There were major performances, too, from soprano Sarah Ogden who grew up in the Holme Valley and who was a magnificent Countess in Young Opera Venture’s Marriage of Figaro at the LBT a year or so ago.

She gave us six of Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, the Massachusetts recluse who wrote some 1800 poems in uniquely punctuated speech patterns. Sarah Ogden was perfect for these, searingly expressive and effortless in the huge and awkward leaps from top to bottom of her impressive range.

These were terrific performances, and I would love to hear her sing Britten with which these songs have some kinship.

Jonathan Fisher, Pianist-in-Residence at Huddersfield University, accompanied with absolute assurance in a programme which also include Debussy’s Fètes Galantes, four of Richard Strauss’s songs, some Quilter, Madeleine Dring, Copland, Barber, Bernstein and Massenet, not to mention the delightful ‘Animal Ditties’ by the American trumpeter and composer Anthony Plog!