The young Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli cuts a slight figure, strolling to the piano and slouching through the introduction to Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. His demeanour is like his playing: a beguiling combination of gravitas and nonchalance. Cascioli's style can edge towards the mechanical as he cuts through the most virtuosic passages with ease. But there are times when that insouciance fits perfectly: the soloist's humorously understated entry in the first movement was superbly timed. And though he didn't aim for the visionary quality that others have achieved in the slow movement, Cascioli's playing exuded a warmly flexible intelligence. For him, as for Vassily Sinaisky and the BBC Philharmonic, this was a robustly 21st-century performance. But with playing so tautly balanced and delicately shaped, the heavyweight sonority of a modern orchestra and piano actually added buoyancy and definition.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony is a challenging piece. Even devotees struggle to love its finale, which replaces the spiritual endings of the Second and Third with a more hard-won, worldly triumph. The result is decidedly ambivalent and any performance that can deliver it with such conviction is a massive achievement. Sinaisky captured perfectly the first movement's blend of grim determination and inflated schmaltz; the finale itself, with its strenuous build-ups to the forced joyfulness of its ending, was gripping in its grotesque overstatement. Most impressive of all, however, was the concentration of the BBC Philharmonic: every one of Mahler's striking effects was delivered with clarity, from off-stage cowbells to the delicious habanera in the second movement.