Earlier in the season, when Symphony Hall was significantly less than full for several apparently attractive programmes, there seemed to be a danger that the City of Birmingham Symphony's spectacularly faithful audience had begun to cool towards music director Sakari Oramo. But on Tuesday there were very few empty seats for a typically inventive Oramo programme. There was no 20th-century music this time, but a neat layering of Smetana and Mahler with another instalment of the continuing survey of Schumann.

Oramo is an interesting musician, with real ideas about what he wants to conduct. Those ideas don't always come off - they can misfire badly in Mozart and Beethoven, for instance - but anyone who makes a feature of Schumann's orchestral music, as he has done in his programme so far this year, gets a vote from me.

This time the Third Symphony, the Rheinish, was in the spotlight. It was a lithe and rhythmically acute performance that never got bogged down, and that dealt perfectly naturally with the metric ambiguities of the first movement. By slightly reducing the weight of strings the orchestral textures were kept transparent and flexible.

The same size forces, based on four desks of cellos and six double basses only, kept the rest of the programme buoyant too. It was framed by two pairs of symphonic poems from Smetana's Ma Vlast: Vysehrad and From Bohemia's Woods and Fields to begin, Vltava and Sarka to end. Oramo sometimes seemed happier in the more spacious moments, the bardic opening to Vysehrad, for instance, than the busier, more excitable writing. But the accompaniments to four of Mahler's Songs from Das Knaben Wunderhorn were full of detail, drawing out the lugubrious counterpoints in a really deliberate account of Der Tambourg'sell, for instance. The strong and forthright baritone of Nathan Berg, meanwhile, was always allowed to make its mark. Berg's determination to tell it as it is, and not to impose any unnecessary interpretative detail, was well rewarded.