The review’s fifth star is awarded for the orchestra’s encore party. They wore bright Venezuelan jackets, twirled their instruments in the air, danced the mambo, bowed to the audience seated behind them, and generally sounded as gobsmackingly bright at a quarter to eleven as they had been almost three hours earlier. No doubt the Simón BolÍvar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela threw the same shindig on Sunday at the Proms.

At the Usher Hall on Friday night this star product of the planet’s most enlightened musical education programme had shown their mettle from the beginning. In Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony one could quibble as usual over aspects of Gustavo Dudamel’s conducting. The heavy foot on the accelerator, say (the Scherzo was just a blur); or the trivialised finale, with Shostakovich’s jollity taken too much at face value. But quirks and flashes of immaturity took nothing away from the clarion call of his orchestra’s brass, the unique bear-like growl of their lower strings, or the serious passion rolling in waves through the mighty first movement. Dudamel played to his strengths there.

The second half brought the high-octane high-jinks: Bernstein’s West Side Story dances, then an extended Latin American bombardment. Was that wise? In strict programming terms, no. Variety suffered, as did the quality of musical invention, at its lowest in Arturo Marquez’s Danzón No 2. But the primitivist grit of Ginastera’s Estancia ballet suite was a joy; and whatever they played, the Venezuelans themselves never lost their heart or sank into shallow brilliance.

Meanwhile, foot tapping of the connoisseur’s kind raced through Jordi Savall’s Friday morning concert with his group Hespèrion XXI at the Queen’s Hall. The night before, the volatile vocal timbre that Savall favours had muddied the impact of Monteverdi’s Vespers. But in this selection of Spanish ballads, folk and court dances from the time of Cervantes, the rapier stabs and fragile sighs of Savall’s wife and daughter, Montserrat Figueras and Arianna Savall, slotted exactly into place. Instrumentally, Hespèrion XXI never put a finger or bow wrong. Being scholarly and earthy at the same time isn’t easy; but Savall’s early music all-stars made it seem so.