Liverpool’s prodigal son, Simon Rattle, is making a bit of a habit of homecomings this autumn as his native city celebrates its year as European Capital of Culture. In consecutive months he has stepped onto the podium of Liverpool’s art-deco Philharmonic Hall — the country’s most distinctive, if not its glitziest or most state-of-the-art — to a packed and rapturous house. In September, it was with his own Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, en route from the Proms; now it was as guest conductor of a revitalised Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the band with which Rattle cut his youthful conductor’s teeth in 1975, but which lost him to Birmingham in 1980.

Until a little over a week ago, he hadn’t conducted the RLPO for more than 25 years. His “homecoming” was big news for Liverpool. He rehearsed the RLPO’s youth orchestra and received the freedom of the city. (It was awarded a few years ago, but this was the first time he had a chance to attend the ceremony.) At the end of the concert, he praised Liverpool’s “fantastic orchestra”, to the evident delight of the audience, a packed house already on its feet for a heartfelt ovation.

Rattle’s return may have been prompted by the Capital of Culture brouhaha, but it comes at a time when the RLPO and its audiences have been galvanised by the principal conductorship of a charismatic young Russian, Vasily Petrenko, who clearly has something of the pulling power deployed by Rattle in Birmingham in the early 1980s.

Since his appointment two years ago, the 32-year-old has certainly created a buzz around classical music in Liverpool, and his face can be seen on banners all around the city, like a dynamic young politician. Petrenko has the looks for an evangelising maestro: strikingly tall, with blond hair and piercing blue eyes, he cuts as commanding a figure on the podium as he does an attractive one on the posters. The RLPO launched him brilliantly, tapping into local footie mania, as “Liverpool’s new signing” and continues to market him unashamedly as a local celebrity. If the musical results were less impressive, this would all seem empty hype, but it is clear that Petrenko delivers.

Although Rattle’s return must have been planned in advance of Petrenko’s appointment, its timing is both an endorsement of the Russian’s work with Liverpool’s musicians and a terrific boost to the RLPO’s prestige. Rattle programmed one of his party pieces: Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, the work he conducted for his debut with the orchestra in 1975, at the tender age of 20. Thirty-three years later, he is, like so many older British conductors before him, an acknowledged master of the Finnish composer’s music, which suits the leaner, earthier sound of our orchestras more than it does those of central Europe.

Rattle’s extremes of dynamics — the scurrying string tremolo fugato of the presto section of the opening movement reduced to a barely audible whisper, the fanfares of the finale blazing out gloriously — nowadays suggest the influence of his Berlin predecessor but one, Herbert von Karajan. Some Sibelians might find his approach too manicured, every musical t crossed and i dotted, but there can be no doubting Rattle’s passionate engagement with this music or the splendour of the RLPO’s playing.

For the first half of his programme, Rattle referenced his more recent association with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He is currently three-quarters of the way through Wagner’s Ring with his elite German orchestra in Aix-en-Provence, and midway at the Salzburg Easter Festival.

Presumably he already knows the big orchestral bleeding chunks from Götterdämmerung, Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Funeral March, but these performances still felt like dry runs for the real thing, and the RLPO players failed to tame the Wagner tubas, the awkward squad of the brass family of instruments. The March lacked the cumulative power of a seasoned Ring conductor, even if the climax packed a punch.

The meat in this indigestible Wagnerian sandwich was also an operatic offcut, although the opera in this case, the Australian composer Brett Dean’s Bliss, to a text by Amanda Holden based on Peter Carey’s novel, has yet to be completed and performed. There are time-honoured precedents for this process — Alban Berg sneak-previewed both his Wozzeck and Lulu in concert — and the three monologues, Songs of Joy, given their world premiere here, are challenging virtuoso pieces, gamely undertaken by Peter Coleman-Wright, cast in the leading role of Harry Joy when Opera Australia premieres the complete work in 2010. Dean once played the viola in Rattle’s Philharmoniker, so it is not surprising that his dense orchestral thinking and pungent word-setting evokes the sound worlds of Berg and Weill rather than anything specifically antipodean. Sometimes Coleman-Wright struggled to make the words “speak”, particularly in the low-lying bassy notes, but he sailed effortlessly through the countertenorish falsetto above the top of his natural range. A little thinning out of the orchestral textures might serve the text — and singer — more fruitfully, but these Joy songs certainly whet the appetite for the complete opera.

At Festival Hall, John Eliot Gardiner’s Brahms: Roots and Memories project reached its second phase: the Third and Fourth Symphonies, prefaced by music by Brahms himself and by composers who influenced him. Though two consecutive concerts failed to attract the audiences they deserved, they were fascinating insights into Brahms’s compositional processes, above all his reverence for the Renaissance and baroque choral tradition. Among a capella and lightly accompanied works, the inclusion of the chorale from Bach’s Cantata No 150 (from which he took the theme for the Fourth Symphony’s finale) and Gabrieli’s Sanctus and Benedictus for 12 voices (which inspired the trombone chorales of the same movement) proved masterstrokes of programming, with the Monteverdi Choir in world-beating voice. The violinists and violists of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique stood at their stand to give extra edge and physical engagement to Gardiner’s bracing, unusually driving propulsion of the symphonies’ outer movements, while the wind players evoked an atmosphere of serenity and rapt calm in the slow movements. With the lean, vibratoless sound of period strings banishing memories of turgid, mud-brown Brahms, and the unconventional scoring of the Fourth’s scherzo, with double bassoon and triangle supplementing the classical Brahms orchestra, this movement sounded more exotic than ever. I await the live recordings with impatience.

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