Alasdair Nicolson's orchestral commission from the BBC specified two pieces that could either provide the frame for a whole concert, or be performed consecutively as a single work. In the event, the premiere of Nicolson's The Broken Symphony did neither; its two parts, Endless Laments and Ghost Dances, each about 10 minutes long, introduced the two halves of David Zinman's concert with the BBC Symphony, and were followed respectively by Brahms's Third Symphony and Beethoven's Violin Concerto, with Julia Fischer as the soloist.

The title is both a literal and a metaphorical one. Though Nicolson says he attempted to "write a symphony in one movement which is 'broken'", he also admits that what was uppermost in his thoughts was the image of a broken world, riven by conflicts both violent and ideological, with the war in Iraq as the most immediate and vivid example. An eighth-century Iraqi poem provided further impetus, and an ancient Persian lament supplied some of the thematic material as one of a bundle of keening monodies that wind through the first movement of the work.

Nicolson's technique of surrounding such slowly moving lines with decorative material recalls early Maxwell Davies, though the outcome here seems much less rigorous and softer-edged, even when, at the end of the first part, the laments are suffocated by the increasingly frantic embellishment.

The second part of the work, heard after Zinman's rather deliberate account of the Brahms and an interval, never quite cohered as it picked up some of the threads of what had gone before, and attempted to create from them an uneasy resolution. An uninterrupted performance might have left a very different impression.

· Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 tonight.