The Hungarian Zoltan Kocsis is a musical superman: pianist, composer, chamber musician, teacher, critic, transcriber, orchestrator and conductor. There is, seemingly, nothing he doesn't do. In this concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, however, there was nothing super-duper or even particularly compelling.

The main interest had promised to be Kocsis' own arrangement of eight songs by Rachmaninov. In terms of orchestral colour, Kocsis' touch was sure enough: the strings were deployed with flair, while the woodwinds pointed up the thematic material. What was less well judged was the balance of orchestra and voice; the solo line was often swamped. It didn't help that the tenor soloist, Kocsis' compatriot Attila Fekete, produced a sound that was clear but rather strident, which meant that the magical softness of the Russian language was lost and some of the melancholic soul of the poetry glossed over. There was confusion, too, with the alteration of the order of the printed poems and their translations. But at least the change meant the sequence of songs came to a joyful end, with the setting of Afanasyevich's Kakoye Schastye (What Happiness).

Kocsis' conducting of Bartok's Two Pictures Op 10 proved more interesting, capturing the unmistakable inflections of Hungarian folk song and the early flirtation with the sounds of French impressionism. They were followed by a performance of Dvorak's Third Symphony in E flat, into whose lyrical warmth the CBSO players settled as though it were a comfort blanket. Here, Kocsis seemed concerned with superficial details - rather as he had in the opening Marche Slave by Tchaikovsky - and not even the Wagnerian expansiveness he brought to the allegro finale could compensate for his shapeless approach to the symphony overall. Not a substandard concert, but a distinctly disappointing one.