Marin Alsop becomes music director of the Bournemouth Symphony in September. It is a make-or-break appointment, one senses, for the orchestra has been in the doldrums artistically and financially for too long, effectively since Andrew Litton stepped down as chief conductor in 1994.

Alsop has to find the right elixir for her new band, a recipe that rejuvenates the orchestra itself, gives it a bit more sparkle and personality, and takes a new look at the programming that makes the repertory more adventurous and appealing, without alienating the BSO's rather conservative constituency.

Alsop is conducting her new orchestra this week, and perhaps gave a foretaste of the way she will package her concerts when she takes over in the autumn. In outline, it was a totally traditional programme, with an overture, a concerto and a symphony, the kind of the thing that has been the staple of the BSO since the days of its founding conductor Dan Godfrey.

The concerto was even the most popular of all for violin: Bruch's First. But the symphony was Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, a work that appears very rarely in orchestral programmes anywhere in Britain. Effectively a three-movement suite drawn from the prewar opera of the same name, it isn't the most obvious crowd-pleaser.

But the Poole Arts Centre was packed for the concert and Alsop already seems to have this audience eating out of her hand. To judge from their performance, the orchestra appears to have established a fine rapport with her, too.

It was sparkling and light-fingered in Rossini's Semiramide Overture, suitably rumbustious in Dvorak's Scherzo Capriccioso, and well on top of all the challenges in Mathis der Maler, nimbly negotiating the strenuous counterpoint in the first movement and ending the work with a refulgent climax.

If that augured well for the new orchestral partnership, the soloist in the Bruch concerto was another bright prospect: the Armenian Sergey Khachatryan, just 16, and the youngest ever winner of the Sibelius violin competition in Helsinki.

As both the concerto and an encore of Ysaye's Third Solo Sonata showed, he is already a mature and supremely confident player with a fabulous tone and technique. He is still a bit impersonal perhaps, but more character will surely come, sooner rather than later.

·Concert repeated at the Guildhall, Portsmouth (0239 2824 3550), tonight.