Jonathan Nott's partnership with the Bamberg Symphony has proved so effective in the 19th-century symphonic repertory, it's sometimes forgotten that Nott is also an experienced interpreter of 20th-century and contemporary music, and was chief conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris for three years. The first of the Bamberg's Edinburgh concerts was a reminder of all that, as Nott conducted two works by Messiaen from the 1960s alongside Bartók's complete Miraculous Mandarin score.

Chronochromie is perhaps the greatest of Messiaen's purely orchestral works, synthesising all the elements in his compositional armoury to create a glittering tapestry of sound. Technically, the Bamberg's performance was spot-on, but in the Usher Hall the work's celebratory brilliance seemed muted; edges weren't quite sharp enough, textures were a little muddied, so some of the startling freshness of Messiaen's invention was lost. There was something a bit dull about his Sept Haïkaï, too; Pierre-Laurent Aimard was his usual immaculate self in the solo piano part, but the orchestral soundworld, with its imitations of Japanese instruments and its ritual exchanges, lacked the pungency it needed.

It was more or less the same story in the Bartók ballet, as well. Everything was perfectly placed and paced, but the mix of menace and sleaze in the early exchanges between the prostitute and her succession of clients was quite safe before the watershed, while, for all its athleticism, the climactic chase didn't unleash the kind of feral energy that we know the score contains. What was lacking most of all was a sense of vivid narrative. The most virtuoso orchestral writing Bartók ever produced was always kept within comfortable limits. In any performance of The Miraculous Mandarin the story needs to be told.