Army of Generals, Hazlewood, St George's Bristol

An “Army of Generals” suggests a kind of supergroup, a fighting force made up of leaders rather than followers. If Charles Hazlewood’s band, which has just started a residency at Bristol’s St George's, is such a host, then he presumably is the Generalissimo, primus inter pares, whose mastery is exercised with a showman's display of almost innocent ego.

Hazlewood, whose proclamation of intent last week stirred considerable reaction among theartsdesk's users, has chosen as his theme for the residency a dialogue between classical music and contemporary work, dubbing it Abstractions and Refractions. The opening programme featured Haydn and Mozart refracted through the lens of Alfred Schnittke, whose Moz-Art à la Haydn provided the witty and inventive centre piece of the evening.

The choice of military associations for Hazlewood’s group of period-instrument players, led by Peter Hanson, is quite revealing, as there is something of a personal campaign here: an attempt to present classical music in a more palatable and entertaining way, without losing the essential quality of the works themselves. There is a good reason that Hazlewood has become something of a TV star: he is one of those gifted popularisers the BBC occasionally throws up, a five-star communicator-cum-showman who whips up an almost religious fervour, and gets the audience cheering and wolf-whistling as if we were at a rock gig, not in a converted church in posh Clifton.

Each piece is prefaced by an introduction delivered with charm and brio. What distinguishes his approach is the underlying seriousness of his venture. This is meant to be an educational experience, but it is also entertainment, with jokes about fast cars and pissing sows - no heavy-handed musicology here.

Haydn’s Mercury Symphony (No 43 in E flat) provided a good opener, the generals a little slow to get going, as if their conductor’s charismatic spiel had upstaged them. But a few minutes in, and the orchestra gelled, delivering a fluent performance of a symphony full of those surprising and innovative twists and turns that, in Hazlewood’s words, “stab you in the eye”, and demonstrating that Haydn was in many ways well ahead of his time.

The Schnittke piece that followed, Moz-Art à la Haydn, a “play with music for two violins and strings” featuring soloists Peter Hanson and Caroline Bolding, is one of a number of pieces in which the Russian composer paid light homage to 18th-century music. The piece starts and finishes dramatically in darkness, as if the music were leading us on an imaginative journey across time. A “collage” of fragments sampled from Mozart and Haydn and moody interpolations from Schnittke, it's what dance-music producers today would call a mash-up. Perhaps not surprisingly the work was composed in 1977, around the time that the German group Can were experimenting with musical collage; both Can and Schnittke are precursors of a creative approach to composition characteristic of what became known as Post-Modernism.

What makes the piece such a pleasure to hear is the absence of Neo-Classical tics and a series of magical moments in which the chronology of music history and other narratives are challenged with a light touch of irony and an almost dream-like series of interconnected but contrasting musical moments. The timbres and textures achieved by the Army’s strings were at times gossamer-like, with brief moments of atonality that contrasted with the classical quotations. It was a bold choice given the audience-grabbing tone of the rest of the evening, but Hazlewood and his Army pulled it off, making light - but with seriousness - of 20th-century music that might, to some, feel forbidding.

The weakest link in Hazlewood's musical argument was Mozart’s A Musical Joke (K522), supposedly an attempt to write contra naturam a bad piece. The belly laughs trailed in the introduction did not materialise. In German, the title is Ein musikalischer spass and “spass” can mean a joke, or just "fun". This felt like neither, and Mozart taking the piss is just plain tedious.

The Mozart symphony that followed, however, was rendered with the combination of vigour and delicacy that No 29 in A (K201) requires. The Army's violins and violas play standing up, and full-bodied engagement with their instruments and the music was forcefully reflected in a thrilling performance. There was a captivating airiness to the Andante, which softened the audience in readiness for the full force of the final Allegro – which Hazlewood had described as “almost rocket-charged”. The small scale of the Army of Generals opens up the score, with the players' energy and enjoyment more than compensating for their limited number.

However, Hazlewood’s decision to accompany the music with projections of cloud images (courtesy of the Cloud Appreciation Society) was, to my mind at least, a mistake, as they added little to the music even if many of the images were very beautiful. They were present throughout, losing the force that more strategic placing might have afforded. Making visual theatre out of classical music concerts requires more than this: few can come anywhere close to Simon McBurney’s visual accompaniment to Shostakovich quartets in The Noise of Time, the Emerson Quartet's multimedia live performance of 2000, and it requires the skill of a theatre or video director. Otherwise there is a temptation to listen with eyes wide shut. There is no need for such a skilled Army to practise entertainment overkill.

• See the rest of St George's Bristol current season
• Read "Charles Hazlewood on Music in Bristol" on theartsdesk