Charles Ives is not a composer who ought to need introduction but, with fellow-American Andrew Litton on the podium, this was a golden opportunity to recruit some converts to the cause. Litton is as much at ease with the microphone as with the baton and his description of Ives ("an insurance guru and startlingly original musician") was as persuasive as his direction of the Three Places in New England. Colours were as rich as fall; the dissonance and mad conglomeration of brass at Putnam's Camp was deftly handled - the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on top form with Litton as conductor laureate.

When it came to their performance of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, the vast difference in style and emotional tenor made it all the stranger to realise that Ives and Rachmaninov were almost exact contemporaries. But there was nothing sentimental or indulgent about the approach of Litton and his soloist, Freddy Kempf, rather, an urgency that created an unrelenting momentum, and passionately argued climactic moments that reinforced the symphonic grandeur of this concerto. Kempf's playing, with a poetic touch as impressive as his powerhouse treatment of the virtuoso element, suggested a new maturity and insight that is wholly gratifying. The rapport with Litton, no mean pianist himself, was instinctive, making this as spontaneous and passionate a collaboration as could be wished for.

By comparison, Saint-Saëns' Third Symphony could never quite match that fire. Litton's shaping of its structure was taut, but it was again his feeling for colour that was revealing and, with an opening that had shades of Berlioz, counterbalanced by moments that could have been from Fauré in the second movement, he succeeded in defining Saint-Saëns more subtly than most.