It is not hard to imagine the English composer John Foulds as the subject of one of Ken Russell's films from his heyday. The ingredients are all there: the young teenager leaving home to scrape a living as a cellist, the joy of joining the Hallé at 20, encouragement from Hans Richter, the mystical intellectual and cultural pursuits, the natural eccentricity, the fascination with India, his death there from cholera.

The life teems with exotic detail, rather like his music. Foulds' fertile mind is always bubbling away, the prodigious technical command never less than perfectly controlled. Why, then, is it not possible to sign up wholeheartedly to Sakari Oramo's missionary campaign to have him reinstated as the great genius?

Some of Foulds' material is initially so ordinary, almost banal, as to damn the piece, however wonderful the musical processing. In the short tone-poem April England, originally a piano solo dating from 1926, only one of the two main themes felt worthy of the Foulds treatment. By far the most intriguing part of the piece was a sequence of eight chords, ravishingly orchestrated and inhabiting an utterly different imaginative world, but since it only brought about the reprise of the main material, the moment was all too quickly lost. While there's no mistaking the total commitment Oramo brings to every Foulds piece, it may be a while before the rest of the musical world is as convinced as he is.

In the second half, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade provided a glittering showcase for the virtuosity of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with Oramo relishing its flamboyant climaxes. But the concert's high point was Paul Watkins' performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto. Here was a subtle balance of passion and compassion, revealing the deep sense of anguish underlying the superficially idyllic pastoral and achieving some strikingly beautifully sounds.