For more than a quarter of a century after the end of the second world war, many German composers tried to rid their work of its associations with the music of the past and create a new language untainted by what had gone before. Now, though, things have changed completely and a number of leading figures, including Wolfgang Rihm, Jörg Widmann and Detlev Glanert, often engage in active dialogues with the music of their predecessors. Next month, the BBC Symphony gives the UK premiere of Glanert’s 150th-birthday tribute to Richard Strauss, and Semyon Bychkov began his concert with the orchestra with the first performance in London of Glanert’s Brahms-Fantasie, which the BBC commissioned four years ago.

Subtitled “heliogravure for orchestra”, the fantasy is a tightly packed 12-minute tribute, which is fuelled more by allusions to Brahms than by direct quotations. Shapes are whisked away almost as soon as they become recognisable, accumulating momentum as they go; the main climax is fierce, giving way to the briefest of codas, and the integration of what is borrowed from Brahms with what is Glanert’s own creative property seems natural and seamless.

Real Brahms came later, when Bychkov conducted an imposing account of the First Symphony. It began assertively, with the BBCSO making the most of the chance to show off its rich depths of tone, but the performance lost its way in the second and third movements especially, as Bychkov’s insistence on expressive mouldings, with unnecessary ritenutos and diminuendos, began to interrupt the music’s natural flow. Before it, Paul Watkins’s account of Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto, by contrast, had been a model of directness and common sense, his virtuosity and musicality put unassumingly at the service of the music.