Receiving its European premiere in this BBC Symphony programme under Oliver Knussen was Wanderlust by the 31-year-old American Sean Shepherd. It's a triptych, each panel describing a place – the windy deserts of the composer's native Nevada, the area around Aldeburgh, and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which Shepherd knows only from its designs.

Each movement successfully conjures a specific atmosphere. While demonstrating a consistently brilliant use of colour, the result proved pleasant but insubstantial.

The real meat in the programme came in the second half, with the premiere of the revised version of Julian Anderson's choral work Heaven Is Shy of Earth, which sets parts of the Mass, Psalm 84 and poems by Emily Dickinson, and was first heard at the 2006 Proms. Since then Anderson has extended it with a further movement, Gloria (with Bird), which highlights the piece's intention to reflect and celebrate the natural world.

Anderson's command of the orchestral medium is consistently on display. Layered through with the strands of the choral writing, consummately realised by the BBC Symphony Chorus, the result is a sumptuous and perfectly structured score that is immediate in its impact yet subtle in the fineness of its surface allure. Susan Bickley was the confident soloist, conveying the bulk of the Dickinson extracts with determination.

Before the interval, Claire Booth struggled to do the same in Aaron Copland's Dickinson settings, her delicate soprano sometimes masked by the composer's arrangements.