Michael Seal, normally a second desk, second violin player in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, won his conducting spurs when he stepped into the breach and onto the Symphony Hall podium in December 2004. A few months later, he was named the orchestra's assistant conductor, and in this, his first full-blown, full-scale concert, he vindicated that appointment.

In a programme of English music spanning the 20th century, he maintained an efficient and disciplined, if sometimes ungainly, grip. Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings was tightly reined with barely a trace of sentimentality, while in Walton's First Symphony, Seal's insistence on strongly detailed rhythmic characterisation was balanced by his penchant at climactic moments for the large, expansive gestures favoured by his mentor Sakari Oramo, the CBSO's music director.

The evening's main interest focused on the Piano Concerto by Walton's fellow Lancastrian Hugh Wood. Written for Wood's former pupil Joanna MacGregor, she was the highly persuasive interpreter here, bringing a dynamic and percussive force to the abrasive language of its outer movements. Even when angry and anguished, Wood's writing is always fluently discursive, permitting the more relaxed episodes to blossom lyrically.

Yet it was the central adagio mesto, where Schoenberg meets Sweet Lorraine, that carried the greatest impact. Wood's progression to overt quotes ultimately reached one kind of resolution, but it was the painful yet poetic clarity of the emotional epiphany realised in the piano's quietest utterances, tinged with the sound of celeste and beautifully articulated by MacGregor and Seal, that was most deeply touching.