Giant statues towered over the 12 members of the Orchestra of St John’s as they took their places in the atrium of the Ashmolean Museum. One finely profiled stone head seemed to gaze particularly intently over conductor John Lubbock’s shoulder, as if inspecting the score of each piece played.

This was the first Ashmolean Cushion Concert: you decided your own level of comfort, according to the amount of padding you’d brought along. Those who had left their cushions at home, and dusted off their lightweight folding picnic chairs instead, looked particularly comfortable. The £20 ticket price seemed steep for a 90-minute concert until you realised that a major bonus was included: an after-hours viewing of the magnificent Pre-Raphaelites and Italy show.

Lubbock had plainly anticipated that some of us would not have thought our seating out properly on this debut occasion, and wisely selected two intriguing musical rarities and a familiar, not too demanding, finale to occupy our minds. First came Hugo Wolf’s lilting, single-movement Italian Serenade. The work’s skittish melodies, with their rising and falling dynamics, suited the OSJ strings very well — and from my position at least, demonstrated that the Ashmolean’s atrium possesses excellent acoustics. You were left wishing that Wolf had completed this colourful miniature — two further movements were projected.

Next came Il Tramonto, Respighi’s setting of Shelley’s poem The Sunset. It was fascinating to hear Respighi, best known for large-scale descriptive pieces like Pines of Rome, in more intimate mode as mezzo Christine Sjölander weaved the words beautifully in and out of the string accompaniment. To me, the piece’s sound world conjured up more than a hint of Berlioz’s Nuits d’été.

The OSJ rounded off this most successful new venture with a well-focused account of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, with playing both light-footed and vigorous as required. The next concert features the OSJ Voices singing carols on December 19.