At 15, clarinettist Julian Bliss has already enjoyed considerable success. Yet, as he took the stage with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in this concert, there must have been many - mindful of today's blurred distinction between achievement and celebrity - whose instincts would have been to get him out of there.

It was reassuring, then, to hear a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto marked by acute sensitivity. Bliss's technical facility found him running away a little unsteadily in the first movement, but balance was regained in the adagio, which had all the serenity and intimacy of chamber music. Indeed, the restraint exercised by conductor Vassily Sinaisky, even into the final rondo, made it closer in spirit to the Clarinet Quintet and Bliss, for all his youth, seemed to suggest that unguarded optimism here was not appropriate for a work which - written just weeks before Mozart's death - also hints at a manic despair.

Richard Strauss' tone-poem Ein Heldenleben, where almost everything is writ large, could not have been in greater contrast. Sinaisky, for whom no detail of expression or attack is too fine to merit his careful attention - as Rossini's overture La Gazza Ladra showed - is nevertheless a conductor who urges his players to a fabulously rich and expansive sound. While one almost wanted to dock them a couple of stars for the unseemly relish with which the woodwind attacked the section where the composer-hero depicts the critics, all the solos were delivered with a style which managed to be fastidious yet relaxed, with Sinaisky pacing every element of the Straussian rhetoric to perfection.

For all his mastery of the grand gesture, though, the Russian is not one to hog the limelight. As he directed the applause to the CBSO musicians, his message was clear: they were the real heroes.