James MacMillan's Quickening is about new life, its miracle and its perils. But for a work conceived on such a massive scale and dealing with a subject of such enormity, it is underwhelming. Eight years on from its BBC Proms debut in 1999, this first Birmingham performance - with the composer conducting and deploying the City of Birmingham Symphony's mighty vocal and orchestral forces as well as the Hilliard Ensemble - might have been the occasion for it to tap some primal energy and perhaps resonate a fundamental truth about our existence. But no.

Michael Symmons Roberts's text - a sequence of four poems: Incarnadine, Midwife, Poppies and Living Water - is so contrived as to be both mawkish and melodramatic and MacMillan's word-setting often only serves to underline its shortcomings. In touching on death in a piece about birth, Roberts is exploring a profoundly philosophical, Heraclitan vein, yet at no point does the cantata create a comparable emotional depth.

By way of aural perspective, Britten's Four Sea Pictures and Vaughan-Williams' Fourth Symphony were heard in the concert's first half. There was little insight into the Britten, with the picture of Moonlight sounding generally cloudy. However, MacMillan brought far greater conviction to the final Storm and it was his propensity for indulging the ominously stormy, martial sounds of the Symphony that made the strongest link with his own work.