New Zealand-born composer Lyell Cresswell's new orchestral piece, Ara Kopikopiko, is a musical labyrinth. In its world premiere performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Porcelijn, the piece was a teasing orchestral maze. Ideas recurred in unpredictable ways: a song-like tune for the cellos, a glacial texture of string sonority, a passage of aggressive, scherzo-like music. The piece was commissioned thanks to the Elgar Bursary, set up to encourage music to "push back the boundaries, but not at the expense of accessibility and integrity". There was no doubting Ara Kopikopiko's playful immediacy. It was just that much of the piece sounded more like an overblown film score than an independent musical structure. By the end, what began as an inviting musical game had turned into a rambling, episodic experience.

In this context Grieg's Piano Concerto, performed by Andreas Haefliger, was an object lesson in how to create a piece that is both lyrical and large-scale. Haefliger created some magical moments, like the delicate musical cascades at the start of the second movement, or the big melody in the third. Even if his interpretation was self-consciously heroic in the work's big bravura passages, such as the first movement's cadenza, this performance revealed the brilliance of Grieg's masterpiece.

Rachmaninov's Third Symphony is one of his most elusive works, but Porcelijn and the BBCSO players made a convincing case for this strangest of symphonies. After the doom-laden melodies of the first movement, the slow movement framed a sulphurous scherzo, of flickering figuration for harps and celeste. Instead of building to a rousing climax, the piece culminated with a long, slow interlude, in which the momentum of the music threatened to dissipate completely, before the headlong rush of the final bars, played with ferocious energy.