Next month the 33-year-old Julian Anderson follows in the footsteps of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Judith Weir as the City of Birmingham Symphony's third composer-in-association. He will work with the orchestra for three years, writing pieces for them, for their sibling chorus and for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The knowledgeable and faithful Symphony Hall audience had a taste of what to expect when Sakari Oramo began his CBSO programme by conducting one of Anderson's most attractive and successful orchestral works, The Stations of the Sun, which he wrote to a commission for the 1998 Proms.

Loosely based on the rotation of the seasons, the score shows off the full range of Anderson's gifts - as an expert orchestrator with a sharp ear for colour and texture, as an inventor of memorable melodic ideas, and as a lucid organiser of musical structure. All this makes the progress of this 17-minute piece easy to track. The sections flow seamlessly into one another, the emotional heart of the work is exactly sited in a long-limbed melody that wells up in the brass at its mid point, and the pulling together of all the harmonic threads in the coda is totally satisfying.

Oramo's performance was first-rate - vivid and carefully detailed, with a real dramatic sweep - but he remains a perplexing conductor. Though Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, which took up the second half of the programme, has an extrovert grandeur that suits his propulsive approach, Mozart's C major Piano Concerto K467, which followed The Stations of the Sun, certainly does not.

Alexei Lubimov's account of the solo part may have been rather eccentric, full of self-conscious ornamentation and stiff-fingered emphases, but the accompaniment the CBSO provided was wretched, sloppy in both articulation and tuning. Oramo seems to know only two ways of tackling a Mozartian phrase, either in jagged sforzandos or slithery, shapeless legato. Neither is remotely convincing.