With any comprehensive survey of a composer's output, there are bound to be thinner patches and, halfway through Birmingham's Igorfest, this concert of Stravinsky songs mixed with orchestral works risked as much. Yet, its inclusion of works drawn from over half a century was a timely reminder of Stravinsky's musical roots as well as the vast span and fertility of his creative imagination.

In the song cycle The Faun and the Shepherdess Op 2, Stravinsky's debt to Tchaikovsky and to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov was audible. Conductor Sakari Oramo and the American mezzo Lucy Schaufer invested the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's sound with a warm and deeply Russian lyricism, underlining this mainspring of Stravinsky's inspiration.

The contrast between the lushness of this Pushkin setting and the intense clarity of Two Poems by Balmont and Three Japanese Lyrics, written just a few years later, could not have been more striking. In the latter, Claire Booth's expressive soprano matched the delicate hues of the chamber instrumentation, while her Three Little Songs had a nicely spiky humour. Schaufer brought both earthy character and burnished tone to Pribaoutki and Cat's Cradle Songs.

The wit and buoyancy of the suite from the ballet Pulcinella was a good foil for the tight focus of the songs, with Oramo highlighting Stravinsky's injections of harmonic wildness into the original baroque numbers. The CBSO brass revelled in the dissonances of Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa, and again in the hunting horn-calls of the central Eclogue of the orchestral Ode. Such frivolity in a triptych commissioned by Koussevitsky as a memorial to his wife suggested that Stravinsky, like Gesualdo, could get away with murder.