Andrew Litton has been the Bergen Philharmonic's music director since 2003. In those 10 years, the orchestra has continued to rapidly ascend the international ladder, and its current British tour provides a good opportunity to confirm in concert the qualities that its recordings with Litton, and other conductors, suggest. The programmes for the tour certainly include showpieces in which the orchestra can display its prowess. In the opening concert in the Usher Hall, the test was provided by Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, launched by Litton on a carpet of rich string tone, which is one of the orchestra's most striking characteristics. It was maintained on a sweeping, even trajectory, full of carefully fashioned detail from woodwind and brass, without ever toppling over into empty posturing.

Touring Norwegian orchestras don't leave home without at least one piece by Grieg in their luggage, and for this concert it was the Piano Concerto, with Christian Ihle Hadland as soloist. It's not easy to make such a familiar work seem freshly minted, but Hadland quickly showed why he is so highly regarded – he is one of the current crop of BBC New Generation Artists – with a performance that was both lyrically flexible and muscular when required; for all his subtleties, there was nothing small-scale about any of it.

Litton had opened the concert with Delius's little-known early symphonic poem On the Mountains, which was sketched when the composer was on a walking holiday in Norway with Grieg and Christian Sinding in 1889. With its stylistic debts to both Grieg and Strauss, it's a bit garrulous and occasionally repetitive, but most of the music is direct, bracing and attractive – partly because the glutinous harmonies of Delius's best known works were then still many years in the future.

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