After a decade as the brightest young talent on the German composing scene, Matthias Pintscher's parallel career as a conductor is now developing just as spectacularly. Both skills were represented in this BBC Symphony Orchestra programme, for as well as conducting Messiaen's late, slender Mozart tribute, Un Sourire, Ravel's rarely heard Shéhérazade Overture and the 1945 suite from Stravinsky's Firebird, Pintscher also oversaw the British premiere of his own 2005 cello concerto, Reflections on Narcissus, in which Truls Mork was the awesomely accomplished soloist.

Pintscher's work is divided into five "reflections" which play more or less continuously. But how it relates to the Greek myth of Narcissus, and what the new work's connection is with another piece for cello and ensemble called The Metamorphosis of Narcissus that he wrote in 1992, were all left unexplained in the singularly unforthcoming programme note. As an entirely abstract work for cello and orchestra, though, Reflections still proved absorbing, with the relationship between the solo instrument and the orchestra constantly evolving against the background of the five-movement form.

It is only in the last third of the 40-minute work that anything approaching a dialogue develops. Until that point the orchestra is used mainly to add acerbic punctuation and explosive comments to the cello's ruminations, which themselves occasionally rev up into scherzo-like athleticism or freeze in glacial harmonics. Towards the end, ideas do seem to get exchanged and a common musical purpose emerges, all wonderfully assured, even though there must be more to it than the audience was allowed to know.