The twin themes of this year's City of London Festival - Paris and the Abolition of the Slave Trade - converged neatly in this programme by the ever-resourceful Nash Ensemble.

Parisian culture in the Teens and Twenties of the last century was fertilised by that of black émigrés, descendants, many of them, of the enslaved Africans from whom colonialist powers had previously profited.

No work of the period expresses the anguish of imperialist guilt more forcefully than Ravel's Chansons Madécasses. The central song's howls of pain were delivered with frightening intensity by François Le Roux, and if his tone is no longer quite as mellifluous as it once was, he nevertheless brought a voluptuous Gallic sensibility to the outer songs, with their intimations of moonlit ecstasy.

Le Roux returned in the second half to dispatch the nonsense song Honoloulou of Poulenc's Rapsodie Nègre with po-faced solemnity, the ensemble offering suitably laconic support.

In Milhaud's La Crèation du Monde, played by a smaller and less colourful ensemble than usual, the jazzy rhythms of the final movement, The Man and Woman Kiss, were exploited to titillating effect.

Saint- Saens's Clarinet Sonata, something of a rarity, was written in the year of the composer's death, 1921, but looks back to an earlier era than the chic, unsentimental one ushered in by Milhaud, Poulenc and their circle. Michael Collins brought an irresistibly mellow tone and restrained hedonism to the outer movements, and an aptly sinister, oppressive quality to the Lento.

The rapt ethereality of the first movement of Ravel's Piano Trio was crystallised in the ensemble's handling of the coda, with its other-worldly harmonics.

Violinist Marianne Thorsen and cellist Paul Watkins cultivated broader lyrical spans in the passacaglia, finally scaling the movement's emotional heights, while pianist Ian Brown relished the concerto-like grandiloquence of the finale.

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