Tackling Walton's Belshazzar's Feast for the first time marked a milestone for Sakari Oramo. With the doors of Symphony Hall's acoustic chambers flung wide open and with two brass choirs in opposite high galleries, he was clearly aiming to exploit the work's brilliantly explosive force, and indeed succeeded.

Walton was attracted by the sheer theatricality of the Old Testament story and the music has an epic, filmic quality. Oramo conducted as one possessed, despatching the pungent rhythms with laser precision, but also underlining the playful, jazzy feel. Baritone soloist James Rutherford becomes ever more resonant and authoritative of tone; here, it was his perfect diction and vivid colouring of words that created the high drama, while the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Orchestra gave their all.

The vibrancy of the Walton made the concert's first half pale into insignificance. Oramo had begun with an unsentimental but warm account of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, but the contemporary strand of this English programme created a contrast but no great impact.

Simon Halsey conducted his CBS Chorus in the premiere of Julian Anderson's Four American Choruses, of which the second, Most Beautiful Eden, divided into four choruses, intriguingly echoing Ives. On his way to the platform to take a bow, Anderson got a bit lost; the music felt like that too.

Steven Isserlis was the cellist in David Matthews' Concerto in Azzurro, a work inspired by and aspiring to the idyllic blue of open sky. More interesting than the frenzy of notes in which the cello must somehow rediscover its lyrical self was its engagement with the orchestra's cello section, yet - while in the cello's final high, and for Matthews' synaesthetic blue B flat, there is a sense of attainment - it did not touch the heart.