In the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's Classic Asia series, which embraces Indian classical music and European music influenced by Indian culture, John Foulds serves as an unsung hero: Indo-European fusion was a musical ideal he cherished. In 1939 cholera claimed him before he could fully explore these ideas, but some of the early fruits of his fascination with all things mystic remain.

The Three Mantras, a part-abstract, part-programmatic symphonic suite of three movements, was originally the prelude to his massive three-act Sanskrit opera, Avatara, whose theme was the incarnation of deity on earth. Only the central slow Mantra of Celestial Bliss has what we would call a mantra: a resonating but calming formula. The wordless sounds of young female voices (the CBS Youth Chorus pure and true) and an impressionistic texture suggested a sympathy with Debussy and the inspiration he drew from Javanese gamelan music. But in the outer movements, the Mantras of Action and of Will, reflecting respectively terrestrial and cosmic visions, Foulds's layers of repetition and variation felt unrelenting, with moments of hyper-Holst and, by the end, bombastic overtones of empire. Not great music by any means, and not hard to see why Foulds destroyed the rest of the opera - but there was more than mere curiosity value here, thanks to the total conviction of conductor Sakari Oramo.

The evening's success had more to do with the two Russian works that made up the programme. In a wonderfully accomplished performance of Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, Akiko Suwanai's lyrical lines had a searing beauty, proving beyond doubt that she is worthy of playing Jascha Heifetz's Stradivarius.

Finally, the CBSO were in vibrant form for the 1947 version of Stravinsky's Petrushka, with Leon McCawley bringing an incisive ring to the concertante piano role and Oramo bringing strong theatricality to the crazed and dysfunctional characters, underlining just how brilliantly this music transcended its function as a ballet score.