Bitter experience suggests there can sometimes be an inverse relationship between the enduring worth of a new score and the battery of percussion instruments deployed to perform it. So the heart sank at the amount of ironmongery on the platform before the UK premiere of the violin concerto by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher.

But how wrong can one be? Larcher's concerto was not like that at all. Though it required an enormous orchestra at times, it is scored in the most delicate and interesting ways. The full weight of that intimidating percussion section was only rarely deployed, and then to focused effect. The default modes of the concerto are an often haunting stillness, out of which the piece develops and to which, at the end of its two movements, it returns. The mood is set by the compelling opening pages, gravely played by the dedicatee Isabelle Faust, in which the accompaniment rocks gently back and forth beneath the spare solo line, before giving way to more restless and vertiginous but still delicately scored writing in which a fragmentary dialogue between the soloist and an accordion plays an atmospheric part.

Larcher's indebtedness to the music of Toru Takemitsu made the Japanese composer's Requiem an appropriately severe and reflective opening to the evening, as well as enabling his compatriot, Kazuki Yamada, to reveal prowess as a collegiate rather than a despotic conductor. Yamada's rapport with the orchestra was also plain in Rachmaninov's second symphony, after the interval. But this is a problematic work and the symphony requires more direction and disciplined restraint than Yamada seemed inclined to provide if it is not to lose its way amid its own sumptuous loudness, as this performance did. The BBCSO clearly enjoyed themselves, though, and the personable Yamada must surely make an early return to the London podium.