There are pianists who move, sway, grimace, even sing along as they play - enchanting for some listeners, irritating for others. Stephen Hough is quite different. His body barely moves, his face hardly even twitches. All the action seems to come from the fingers and the forearms. The surprise is in the power of the sound he makes: it is hard to see where the energy is coming from.

Hough's performance of Saint-Saen's Piano Concerto No 4 was in many ways typical: strong, brilliant in showy writing, lucid and poised in more quietly expressive moments. But the concerto itself is a strange piece: quirky and bland by turns. Moments stick in the memory (the scintillating virtuoso writing of the Scherzo, the striking anticipation of Rachmaninov in the central slow section), but the total effect is very much less than the sum of the parts. It would have been interesting to hear something which stretched Hough's artistry as well as his technique.

Before this, Sakari Oramo conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. They gave a well-mannered but uninspired account of Mozart's Paris Symphony (No 31). The high points of the evening came in their performance of Holst's The Planets - in the obsessional brutality of Mars, the thunderous good-humour of Jupiter and the elemental visit of Uranus. Best of all was the weird, otherwordly sound of the female voices of the CBSO Youth Chorus in Neptune. Even then the best choirs can go horribly astray in the ethereal fade-out at the end, but these youngsters held truer than most, and in the Symphony Hall acoustic, even the final silence was magical.