BBC Philarmonic, Harrogate Festival

How do you lure a busy composer such as Michael Nyman to Harrogate ? apart from the obvious temptations of Betty's buns or Taylors' tea, of course?

How do you lure a busy composer such as Michael Nyman to Harrogate – apart from the obvious temptations of Betty's buns or Taylors' tea, of course? Is it enough for his name, his band and his film music to dominate the opening few days of the town's 36th music festival? Or for local schoolchildren to create their own Nyman-inspired score to Chess Fever? What surely clinched it was an invitation to Nyman from the Harrogate Festival and the Yorkshire Orchestral Consortium to write a new orchestral work, funded by Yorkshire Arts, with the prospect of several performances by various ensembles across the county. It's the sort of commission composers dream of.

For Nyman, flirting for more than 20 years with the idea of writing an opera on Tristram Shandy, the Yorkshire connection between its author Laurence Sterne and the commissioning body was irresistible. As with one of his earlier Tristram-inspired settings, and with many other of his purely musical works, the subject is death. He based the new orchestral work and its title, A dance he little thinks of, on an image created by Sterne in the first chapter of Tristram Book VII: "When DEATH himself knocked at my door... I will lead him a dance he little thinks of." The result is a three-movement dance of death which, with its relentlessly repeated phrases, propulsive rhythms, and shifting pulse, must have been murder to play.

Just watching the BBC Philharmonic's strings bowing bravely away on their instruments like automata, brass and wind snatching essential oxygen in their non-stop lines and four percussion players (whose prominent part, interestingly, was added by Nyman after completing the rest of the score) working out on their drum-heavy panoply of instruments was an exhausting experience. The instruction above the vibraphone part in the score "Motor on" might as well apply to the whole band.

This high-octane performance of A dance he little thinks of clearly delighted all the enthusiastic Nymanites who had turned out. On first hearing the effect was somewhat overblown and muddy in texture which might be the fault of the dry acoustic of the Conference Centre that Harrogate insists on using as a concert hall. Or it might not.

If the musicians were left feeling a bit "shandy" (crack-brained and half crazy) after the dance it didn't show in their luminous accompaniment to Yuri Torchinsky's shimmering, delectably pointed reading of Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. Vassily Sinaisky also conducted a vivid account of Holst's Planets, brashly warlike in punchy "Mars" and unsettling in a particularly thoughtful "Saturn". The voices of the unseen – and here uncredited – women's choir in "Neptune" disappeared magically not actually into the ether but, rather less romantically, down in the goods lift to the bowels of the Conference Centre.

The Harrogate Festival runs to 4 August. Tickets 01423 537230