Saturn was Gustav Holst's favourite of the seven pieces that make up The Planets, and so last Friday's landing of the Cassini-Huygens mission on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, may have added a slight frisson to this performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

When he composed the work, Holst had been more interested in the astrological implications of planetary alignment, and he was not inclined to add to the suite following the discovery of Pluto 30 years after he had first begun writing it. By that time, he had grown to resent the work's popularity, and at Symphony Hall, it was hard not to sympathise with that sentiment when the audience's inclination to burst into applause after all the noisy numbers made for a rather juddering trajectory.

More gratifyingly, the reception was equally rapturous for Colin Matthews' Fourth Sonata, the latest in the Encore series of significant British orchestral works. Born of Matthews' flirtation with American minimalism in 1974, the emphasis on sonority is reflected in the very precisely and imaginatively judged soundworld. Yet Matthews' working of thematic strands adds a calm expressivity that, in the string writing in particular, militates against the domination of rhythmic and textural factors - even if, ultimately, it was the violently explosive percussion that proved so compelling.

Hearing the Fourth Sonata in the first half of the concert gave a vibrant context to the playing of Matthews' Pluto, arguably a more stimulating ending to The Planets. Placing the celestial voices of the CBS Youth Chorus just outside the back of the auditorium, conductor Sin Edwards made the transition from Holst's Neptune into the new Pluto work well, and the flurry of solar winds was captivating. A shame, then, that programmers hadn't risked a step further into the great unknown with more Matthews instead of Walton's opening Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, which never really got off the ground.