As part of the Royal Northern College of Music's Resonances festival celebrating John McCabe, the BBC Philharmonic's concert included a work by the much younger composer Stuart MacRae. His Landscape and the Mind: Distance, Refuge moves in generous curves and arches, from a delicate, translucent opening to a powerful breadth and warmth. Though this is one of MacRae's early works - and he is still not yet 30 - Landscape and the Mind clearly shows an assured individual voice.

McCabe's Double Concerto for oboe and clarinet brings together the soloist and orchestra in a friendly fashion. He plays ingeniously on the close relationship between the sounds of both solo instruments by using trills, repeated notes and unisons as some of his most fundamental building blocks. The results are riveting: as the soloists weave in and out of each other's space, they seem to pull the orchestra along with them rather than confronting it or taking their cues from it.

Frequently, the orchestra provides a warm cushion of abstracted sound over which the soloists elaborate. At other times its presence is more striking, as with the remarkable and highly effective timpani obbligato over the soloists' second cadenza. The BBC Philharmonic's own Jennifer Galloway and John Bradbury were ideal partners, each effortlessly tuned in to the other's playing and incisively directed by Clark Rundell.

McCabe's Fourth Symphony makes a more deliberate play with time, moving gradually from fast to slow and back to fast in an arch that also encompasses - as McCabe explained - the span from positive to negative and back. Yet the shifts in tempo are cleverly controlled by material rather than by speed; some motifs are repeated until they become static, while momentum is regained in the second movement's droopy, sombre opening figure with the "positive" theme that leads irresistibly to its concluding blaze of light.