The BBC National Orchestra of Wales usually celebrates New Year in Viennese style, with waltzes and polkas by the Strausses. This time, it changed lilt for swing and went to New York.

The Broadway conductor Eric Stern established a rapport with the BBC NOW in a live performance of Bernstein's Mass some years ago and it was Bernstein's various dance episodes, not just those from On the Town, that worked best here. Conductor and players achieved a balance between precise articulation and relaxed line that kept a sharp edge.

For singers Mary Carewe, Karl Daymond and Brett Barrett, meeting the needs of both live audience and radio listeners was an altogether trickier exercise. Standard microphones and amplification meant that, in the hall, the punch of the songs too often missed their target; only when armed with a hand-mic as in Sondheim's Broadway Baby, was Carewe free to strut her vocal stuff.

Pianist Peter Jablonski was the soloist in Gershwin's Second Rhapsody, which portrays the sound and rhythms of New York. Jablonski captured the verve and the deliciously bluesy harmonies, but never quite turned the heat on. While music by Jules Styne and Frank Loesser also featured in this American programme, there was a welcome Viennese interloper: HK Gruber. His Manhattan Broadcasts were completed when he was 21, before he adopted his more outrageously anarchic style. Stern could not disguise the occasional faltering of energy, but Gruber's assurance and instinct came through loud and clear.

If one were to suggest a New Year's resolution for this orchestra, it would be to have fewer muddled programmes, on the basis that less is more. This evening was necessarily a miscellany but, having opted to end on a quiet note with Bernstein's balladic Some Other Time, they encored with the overture to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Sadly, Loesser could not be more.