This is a curious way of celebrating the 80th anniversary of the BBC: a rather unprepossessing concert in Birmingham of music by Barber, Elgar and Muldowney, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. The programme clearly had not caught the imagination of local concert-goers; Symphony Hall was significantly less than full for what should have been a much more glamorous event.

A new work from Dominic Muldowney, though, is always worthwhile, and his Piano Concerto No 2, commissioned for the occasion, provided the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal affair. Muldowney has been ploughing his own musical furrow for quite a while now. He has established a style that is distinctive and attractive; his writing is rhythmically deft, harmonically sophisticated and melodically beguiling.

The concerto was written for Angela Hewitt, and her mastery of Bach and fondness for early 20th-century French music chimed with Muldowney's preoccupations. Textures are transparent (the orchestra is classical-size), and the piano writing is lucidly contrapuntal. In the outer movements, the effect is like a piece of 1920s Poulenc or neoclassical Stravinsky refracted through a postmodernist prism, with unexpected juxtapositions and changes of direction. In the central movement, aqueous piano writing (akin to parts of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit) is supported by a web of melodic ideas in the orchestra. It is quaint, witty and often very beautiful.

Over the rest of the evening, though, it would be better to draw a discreet veil. Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva is a truly ghastly piece of tub-thumping. Thomas Trotter worked hard at the bombastic keyboard writing, but to no avail. And setting the acoustics of Symphony Hall to maximum resonance (why?) did not help Slatkin make sense of the detail in Elgar's First Symphony. One could just about hear the landmarks in each movement, but little else. This was an approximation to a great piece of music architecture; its subtly changing perspectives were scarcely suggested here.