CBSO/Nelsons

Andris Nelsons is conducting a dozen widely ranging programmes in his first season as the City of Birmingham Symphony's music director, so by next June we should have a better sense of what this hugely talented young Latvian has brought to his new orchestra. This first concert, though, already suggests that the omens are very good, and that the deep impression Nelsons made in his earlier appearances with the CBSO were not misleading.

He is a far more subtle and thoughtful interpreter than some of the publicity surrounding his appointment suggested. Characterised by some as an up-and-at-'em young conductor, capable of injecting huge energy and excitement into everything and everyone he conducts, he is actually a musician who takes immense care over detail, and over the precise proportioning of every formal shape. The opening of Wagner's Rienzi Overture here was exquisitely moulded, and the tension allowed to build with total naturalness until the final pages were joyously unbuttoned, yet still firmly under control. There was a similar arc to Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin suite, with the fine-etched woodwind tracery just as impressively presented as the helter-skelter ending.

Already, Nelsons seems different from his two Birmingham predecessors, Simon Rattle and Sakari Oramo, in one significant respect - he is a conductor who is at home in an opera house (he has been music director at Latvian National Opera for five years) and who thinks in theatrical terms. There was a vivid sense of drama here - not just in Wagner and Bartók, but in his superbly sustained handling of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, whose central slow movement tests any conductor's powers of coherence. Nelsons made it a wonderfully diverting journey, finding new things to admire at every turn. There will be plenty more of those over the coming months and years.