It has generally been a very good year for Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra: their concerts together have been both typically enterprising and technically first rate. But their last appearance together in 2015 was the exception, and as disappointing an evening as I’ve experienced at a BBCSO concert in a long time. On paper it had promised well. Symphonies about mountains by Alan Hovhaness and Richard Strauss provided the frame for the UK premiere of Switch, a percussion concerto (a BBC co-commission) by Andrew Norman in which Colin Currie was the soloist.

But of the three elements only Hovhaness’s 1955 Symphony No 2, Mysterious Mountain – with its gently unfolding chorale-like outer movements separated by a spiky double fugue, like a fusion of Vaughan Williams and Carl Nielsen – came close to expectations. Oramo’s performance suggested that Hovhaness, little known on this side of the Atlantic, is a composer he could profitably explore further. But his account of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony hardly rose much above sea level, with none of the spacious grandeur and wonder at the natural world that the music needs; it was scrappily played by the BBCSO too, suggesting perhaps that Norman’s new concerto had hogged too much of the rehearsal time.

Had that been time well spent, no one would have minded so much. But Switch turned out to be a tangled, drastically over-scored piece that relies far too much on Currie’s astonishing hyperactive virtuosity, and on his ability to suggest that the most generalised percussion writing really is meaningful. Norman’s programme note, describing the piece as “a game of control”, with the soloist as the protagonist in a video game, and both the solo percussion instruments and those in the orchestra cuing the ways in which the other instruments play, only added another layer of obfuscation. Nothing was clear; nothing lingered from the performance.