Both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic are ardent encouragers of new music. The Philharmonic is to give several first performances this season, mainly as part of the Mahler cycle it is sharing with the Hallé and Manchester Camerata at Bridgewater Hall, and in which Mahler is in each case contextualised by a new work. The CBSO has the benefit of the Feeney Trust for commissioning music. Since 1955, it has been the inceptor of 48 pieces, among them Tippett’s Piano Concerto. The latest is Colin Matthews’s Violin Concerto, which had its premiere with the soloist Leila Josefowicz at Symphony Hall in an interesting programme conducted by Matthews’s longtime advocate Oliver Knussen.

It began with a Britten rarity, Canadian Carnival (1939), an orchestral rhapsody on Quebec folk tunes that are handled with a Mahlerian brilliancy and transparence, and a certain evanescence. Though the material is sharply delineated, it readily melts away. I was put in mind of Mendel­ssohn’s ethereal Midsummer Night’s Dream music. Dreaminess, albeit contrasted with martial and courtly excursions, is to the fore in Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff, given in the second half, unusually with surtitles to outline the narrative of this quintessential piece of “programme music”. Knussen’s approach was brisk and energised, sympathetic but without lingering over the reverie.

What a curious 19th-century innovation programme music was, I felt, as I tried to follow at once the symphonic and pictorial structures, feeling neither was quite satisfactory. I wondered whether Matthews’s concerto might contain hidden significances. Its tone is strangely evocative. The first of the two movements (totalling a little more than 20 minutes) begins dreamily — the tempo marking is Sognando — with iridescent chatter in the background and a high-lying solo line that shimmers like Szymanowski, whose First Violin Concerto Matthews cites as an inspiration. The movement progresses through sections marked Scherzando, Sostenuto and Scorrevole, a sequence whose alliteration hints at secret meaning. The solo instrument is in its top register much of the time; at other times occupied with vigorous virtuoso figuration that is eminently violinistic, for all that Matthews isn’t a string player.

There is a will to melody here, without actual tunes, but the other movement (molto sostenuto) subjects wafting lyricism to the immediate shock of percussive pulsation. Piano, harp and unpitched instruments, including brazen metal pipes and the rare lujon — a wooden box with metal plates, apparently named after the jazz pianist John Lewis — cannot be deflected from their alarming iterations, even when the soloist brings back its initial soaring line, and the neoexpressionist impulse prevails until the end. There is a wealth of savourable orchestral detail, and much of it was clear on this first airing, in a hall whose fine acoustics the composer had in mind. Josefowicz was the most exemplary of soloists. She had memorised the extremely taxing part and projected it with a passion. Not a bar of hers was not imprinted with her personality and thought.

I was glad to catch the second concert in the BBC Phil’s season at Bridgewater Hall. Gianandrea Noseda, the chief conductor, was in charge, and beforehand talked with charm and insight to Lynne Walker on the platform. His and the orchestra’s account of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at the Proms echoes in the mind, but it could not, he indicated, be repeated. Each performance has to be new. He won’t offer the audience a “photocopy”.

His programme was an odd-seeming juxtaposition of Beethoven and Wagner: the former’s brief, forgettable overture The Ruins of Athens and his Violin Concerto — a strong reading with the soloist Leonidas Kavakos — then Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (done with ample forces) and the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Noseda had described the 18 or so minutes of this last item as simply a musical paradise. It was indeed, and the Beethoven concerto’s vast, luminous first movement seemed in retrospect a comparable kind of artificial paradise.

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