The Lancaster Festival does a lot of things well, not the least of which is its ability to stage an exemplary children’s concert.

Last night at the Ohio University at Lancaster amphitheater, the Festival Orchestra crammed entertainment and education in a one-and-a-half hour program that included a charming new orchestra-storytelling version of The Pied Piper.

Written by festival guest composer Gary William Friedman and performed by the orchestra and the creative ensemble Tales & Scales, The Pied Piper was a success both with children and as a dramatic orchestral work.

The plot is the traditional one, but the story is told in a hip, modern style with a “fast forward/rewind” technique, scat singing and enough puns to choke a rat.

The five members of Tales & Scales, so named because they tell stories while they play instruments, took the various parts.

Dee Dee Lawrence was the sweet-singing storyteller, using scat and urban monologue to briskly lead the tale. David Eby put his cello to multiple use as a “video camera” recording an interview with the citizens of Hamelin, or as his bountiful stomach when he was the mayor or as a guitar.

Robert Caron was a French Pied Piper, leading the rats and then the children (16 charming Lancaster children) with his soprano saxophone. The score’s Pied Piper motif, by the way, was beautifully soulful.

The story was crisply adapted by Cathy Chuplis and offerd the traditional sad ending as well as a reworked happy one, made possible by the fast-forward and rewind format. Mercedes Ellington, granddaughter of Duke Ellington, was the director and choreographer. Gary Sheldon conducted.

There was much more to like about this family-friendly evening.

Several thousand people - many of them youngsters - ate picnics at the hilly amphitheater and enjoyed a program in the format of the old Leonard Bernstein young people’s concerts.

Sheldon set the right tone - explaining music and instruments without so many shenanigans that children forgot to concentrate. He had them listening carefully to George Gershwin’s I Got Plenty of Nothin’, as well as the allegro movement from Mozart’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, a piece performed by a spirited 18-year-old, Mirabai Weismehl.

Weismehl, a Californian who will attend Oberlin College, played with a verve and sweetness that made the concerto as ingratiating as the rest of the program.