Perhaps it was inevitable that some of Jaap van Zweden's thunder would be stolen by the announcement earlier this week of Andris Nelsons' appointment as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's next music director. The buzz of anticipation at Symphony Hall was palpable, but it was not about Van Zweden. However, the Dutch conductor - recently named music director of the Dallas Symphony - was undeterred, and, in the circumstances, his pragmatic rather than overtly expressive style served him in good stead.

In Bruckner's monumental Fifth Symphony, the CBSO responded like the consummate professionals they are, with Elspeth Dutch's horn section and the wind chorale in particular bringing a wholehearted character and discipline to their sound. The crowning glory of the Fifth is the finale, with its double fugue and reintroduction of material from the first movement. It is sometimes suggested that this compositional feat can only be appreciated on close study of the score, but Van Zweden's achievement was to make transparent its many complex layers and the wealth of detail that Bruckner painstakingly manipulated.

Yet for all its coherence, the spiritual dimension at the heart of Bruckner's writing was less surely handled. Even with this most solemn work, there is a sense that, in the temporal concern with the intricacies of pattern-making, the composer was conscious of touching on some of the mysteries of the divine. However, Van Zweden only hinted at the redeeming serenity to which the massive architectural structure aspires.

The evening had opened with Mozart's Piano Concerto in G major, K453, in which Louis Lortie was the eloquent if slightly understated soloist. While the idea of two Austrian masterworks separated by a century seemed entirely logical, in retrospect, the self-consciousness of Bruckner somehow only underlined Mozart's blissfully unselfconscious and insouciant grace.