At a time when you could be forgiven for thinking that Mark-Anthony Turnage has a new composition premiered every week, the BBC Symphony Orchestra has bucked the trend by revisiting one of his more enduring works. The Beckett-inspired Your Rockaby, essentially a one-movement concerto for soprano saxophone, was written for Martin Robertson and premiered by him in 1994.

Robertson was again the soloist here, and while it was good to hear him get his teeth into something more substantial than Turnage's saccharine Hidden Love Song, which he premiered with the LPO six weeks ago, his playing this time didn't come across with enough impact to demonstrate why it continues to be such an inspiration to this composer. This was partly down to a slight but surprising carefulness in his performance, but more to the fact that the orchestra, caught up in Turnage's vivid, dense textures and stomping rhythms - this is a lullaby only in its closing section - was impenetrable. Too often it seemed we were listening to an orchestral piece where the saxophonist just happened to be standing at the front. Joseph Swenson's dry, passionless conducting didn't help.

It was framed by two Scandinavian pieces that, though it's too easy to say it, share a certain Nordic serenity that made the Turnage seem fussy. Sibelius's fairytale En Saga, which opened so promisingly with tingling, pulsing strings, could have used a touch more lyricism in its themes than Swenson encouraged; these melodies' final transformation into something heroic didn't seem especially hard won.

Swenson's cool head served the music far better in Nielsen's Symphony No 4, the Inextinguishable, in which restraint and economy early on left the orchestra's tinder dry for the magnificent affirmations later. With the wind adding their own rich but subtle colouring to the first and second movements, and the strings unleashing their heft in the third, this was a performance that combined clarity with a sense of flow.