Classical Music: European Women's Orchestra St George's, Hanover Square, London

Not just the home of Casanova, 18th-century Venice possessed a wealth of admirable academies for female musicians - mostly orphans and illegitimate offspring - which brings us back to Casanova. But that was not the point being made by the European Women's Orchestra at St George's, Hanover Square, last Tuesday. Their subject was the neglected musical excellence these schools produced - and, in particular, the skills of one Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen, composer, violin virtuoso and graduate of the Mendicanti orphanage.

If you find her name obscure, then you're not in good company. Mozart knew it, and father Leopold Mozart wrote enthusiastically about Sirmen's work. Though the known facts of her life would hardly make economical use of space on a modest dust jacket, her music remains as a testament to her worth. During her lifetime, quartets, trios, concertos and duets achieved a European circulation.

Conducted by its musical director, Odaline de la Martinez, the EWO revived Sirmen's Third and Fifth Violin Concertos, each one in three compact movements for strings, wind and horns, and full of crisp, undeveloped emotion in the manner of the Italian late-baroque. The soloist, Ann Hooley, was not always delicate or tonally pure in execution. Yet she played these works with a strong sense of warm, felt sound, as if picking up signals from the spirit of a composer who also shared a close communion with the soul of the violin.

It was a quality felt by turns in the pulsing aerobics of the outer movements, chiefly through sudden and striking melodic phrases that recalled the wayward thoughts of a Haydn or CPE Bach. But in the two slow movements, Sirmen's intimate knowledge of the violin's character was evident from every bar of the slowly unfolding lines.

Instrumental colour for its own sake also played an expressive role. In the Third Concerto, pale, hollow chords, neutered of major or minor thirds, set out a ghostly agenda. In the Fifth, the background was confined exclusively to a glowing, buoyant texture of orchestral violins.

So far the concert had been all women. But after the interval the laws of biological determinism meant the presence of tenors and basses in a better known product of the Italian schools: Vivaldi's Gloria, written for the orphanage of Santa Maria della Pieta. The 32 singers of the Cryes of London made an impressive sound, the gentlemen rendering "Et in terra pax hominibus" with feeling and the sopranos clear and well-tuned both in the briefly unaccompanied "Qui tollis peccata mundi" and in the plain statements of the final "Cum Sancto Spiritu".

Less praise, however, for the orchestra, despite some fine individual playing. While standards of accurate ensemble remained secure, blend and balance came in a poor third - fine for a scratch occasion, yet a departure from the EWO's committed high standard. The most lucid parts were the solo numbers: the "Laudamus", sung by sopranos Lynda Lee and Lurelle Alefounder, and the "Agnus Dei", a showpiece for the smoky alto of Rebecca de Pont Davies, already tested at Garsington Opera earlier this summer and a voice of some potential.