On paper, it was a curious programme: Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, followed post-interval by Adès’s Märchentänze and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. A calculated mix of more and less familiar works, certainly – but an otherwise unlikely foursome. The common preoccupations with folk music (threaded jauntily through the Tippett and the Adès) and the natural world (VW’s lark, Sibelius’s swans) only take us so far. In practice, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance under its chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth revealed a shared creative tussle with existing musical forms and with finding new means of expression without breaking entirely with the old ways.

The Lark Ascending thus abandoned the Smooth Classics at Seven-mode for a covered, sometimes icy sound in the BSO’s world-class strings and a more risk-taking, more improvisatory approach from soloist Anthony Marwood. The tone of his Stradivarius was expensively sweet and his cool, no-vibrato opening compelling, though his performance was marred by intonation problems. Marwood fared better in Adès’s Märchentänze, which reworks folk tunes with unexpected timbral combinations and harmonies, and where the solo line tangles deliciously with the orchestra’s violins. But this work, written for the ultra-charismatic violinist Pekka Kuusisto, was rather less interesting without such a compelling soloist.

By contrast, Sibelius’s Symphony No 5 had personality to burn in a performance that front-loaded its modernist strangeness. There were shadowy wind solos, creepy string tremolos and double basses that lurched nastily instead of settling comfortably into the finale’s swan business. There were also tuning difficulties in the wind and the BSO’s trombones were almost comically direct from where I was sitting. But Wigglesworth’s detailed, sensitive conducting came into its own in the work’s transitional passages, as he eased the weight out of dense textures and managed the journey to the symphony’s climax as a slowly, inexorably cresting wave.

Best of all was the Tippett. Wigglesworth’s tempi were unhurried, even laid-back. Yet there was an angular neatness to Tippett’s neoclassical lines – this was phrasing with hospital corners – and the string sound was subtly malleable: from a striking, frosted tone in the first movement to the generous warmth that spread euphorically through the finale.

• The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at a future date.