Woolworths. A pawn shop. The dreadful corpse of the derelict Theatre Royal. Chatham’s High Street on a Sunday night couldn’t be further from Rodrigo’s inspiration for his Guitar Concerto – “the perfume of magnolias, the song of birds, and the whisper of fountains” – all wrapped in the Aranjuez royal gardens’ stately greenery.

But you reckon without Craig Ogden. Guitar lightly amplified, he gave a spangled gleam or a sunburnt caress to every note. Here was fire, delicacy, soul – items that the City of London Sinfonia, throughout the concert, too often mislaid. Granted, the Central Theatre’s dead acoustic could make hooligans of the Vienna Philharmonic. But that doesn’t excuse the ensemble imperfections or the sour squawks of the strings – a blight when the fingering should have been a walk in the park.

Still, after 36 years with its music director Richard Hickox, this is an orchestra that needs the benefit of a swift kick in the pants. On the sunnier side, the night’s conductor Douglas Boyd knew how to thrust, if not caress, in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and the programming was pleasant. The fugal bones creaked in Villa-Lobos’s eight-cello Bachianas Brasileiras No 1, but there was gusto and, sometimes, sweet cantabile. And any concert with six minutes of music by Tansy Davies, one of the best and liveliest of the young Brits, cannot be entirely bad.

We heard a new commissioned piece, Kingpin, named after the only part of the Model T engine that Henry Ford supposedly found never wore out. Opening lurchings in the bass suggested Frankenstein’s monster on the ballroom floor. But the rhythmic machinery never collapsed as the music wheeled around at conflicting speeds and instrumental colours, clanking, tootling and chortling away until the final upbeat “kerplunk”.

With Davies, contemporary music never lives in an airtight box. It’s out on the street, friendly-aggressive, mingling with rock without ever losing the poise that stems from the right number of notes in the right place. Boyd and the CLS might have shot up and down elsewhere, but in the bedlam of Kingpin, perversely enough, they found stability.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Here comes summer: our cultural must-sees
• Friends reunited: Sex and the City
• New country for old men