If the idea behind a New Year concert is something to do with good luck, then last night’s offering at the Sheldonian felt very lucky indeed. Opening with the Overture from The Marriage of Figaro, conductor Stephen Bell is all good humour and – crucially – good taste. There’s joy here, stemming from a deep commitment to technique. Dynamics and texture are excitingly varied, but all for good reason, and never for empty theatricality. The cellos, led by Peter Adams, have formidable command, so precisely together that you couldn’t slide a credit card between them.

Bell explains between pieces that the repertoire has been chosen for the architecture of the Sheldonian, and it’s easy to see why – both from an acoustic and a visual point of view. There’s grandeur, but also an expansive giddiness befitting the baroque ceiling of painted putti and swags.

Tom Poster joins as soloist for Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. This is glittering. Poster has come fresh from an earlier concert at the Wigmore Hall, but there’s no hint of fatigue to his playing; he enlivens the space. It’s a masterclass in that technical precision which grants space to emotion, rather than constraining it. I was put in mind of a line from a favourite poem of mine, ‘Machines’, by Michael Donaghy: ‘The machinery of grace is always simple,’ he writes, finishing the poem by drawing parallels between the harpsichordist and the cyclist ‘[w]ho only by moving can balance, / Only by balancing move.’ Poster’s balance with the sensitive and exceptionally efficient orchestra is, in fact, less like the machinery of clockwork and more like the mysterious engineering of biology. The pianist has a delicacy of touch which makes his cadences sound as natural, and as miraculous, as breathing. He finishes with a cadenza of filigree delicacy which highlights the stunning symmetry of the piece – one which, it seems to me, is all about balance.

The second half is focused on the whirling excitement of the waltz, with the Strauss family, of course, prevalent. Franz von Suppe’s Morning, Noon and Night and Franz Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltzes provide more texture, and Donna-Maria Landowski precise as clockwork on the ratchet in the Chatterbox Polka. All is tight and elegant as an evening glove.

Such a concert early in the year feels auspicious – and we’re certainly lucky in this orchestra.