Avant-garde composers who dabbled in music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods were a common, if paradoxical, 20th-century phenomenon. Bruno Maderna, a leading figure in Italy's postwar avant-garde, was one of the most skilled. He made many fine transcriptions of Renaissance works, and his Music of Gaity, a suite of dances from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, is elegantly scored for chamber orchestra with solo oboe and violin. The solo parts were beautifully played by BBC Philharmonic principals Yuri Torchinsky (violin) and Jennifer Galloway (oboe), while new principal conductor Gianandrea Noseda never took its simplicity for granted; every phrase was imaginatively shaped, and the delicate textures finely balanced.

Noseda's attention to balance and colour gave extra distinction to Christian Blackshaw's account of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. Blackshaw's playing was polished and incisive rather than flamboyantly expressive, but he allowed the music to breathe, through the lightest possible rubato in the slow movement and gently rippling passagework in the cadenzas.

There were probably many who found the account of Schubert's epic Ninth Symphony inappropriately brisk, even flippant. But then it is one of those works that has acquired a weighty performance tradition, and stripping away a century or more of amassed gravitas is bound to upset some people. Remarkably, this interpretation revealed so much not just about the symphony's folk roots, but also its pivotal importance for later Romantic symphonies.

Instead of smoothing over the roughness, Noseda recognised and celebrated its rustic sources: the scherzo's oompah brass unexpectedly conjured up a 19th-century village band, and the trio had a gentle Bohemian lilt that was distinctly Dvorakian. Noseda showed how the Andante's opening oboe theme, usually wistfully elegant, can be heard as a slightly sinister march, pointing forward to Mahler and Bruckner. It was a revelatory performance, played with the panache and dedication this great work deserves.