MUSIC / Blurred images: Jan Smaczny reviews the start of the Arts Council's 'Sound Inheritance' tour

Despite the arrival of a Beethoven lookalike in Birmingham - a publicity stunt which has to be a strong candidate for naff marketing ploy of the year - the audience for the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, playing at the opening of the Arts Council's 'Sound Inheritance' tour, was well below capacity. Perhaps the lack of imaginative programming had kept the concert-going Brummie at home; an orchestra whose name promises so much might offer an audience something more challenging than two symphonies and an overture by Beethoven. The 'battle symphony', Wellington's Victory, complete with gun and cannon effects, might have done more to fill the Town Hall; and where was the music of Berlioz, for which the orchestra already has an enviable reputation?

Their spirited performance of the Coriolan overture raised expectations. Sadly, few of these, apart from fast speeds, were fulfilled. John Eliot Gardiner's fiercely up-tempo view of so much of the music led to the blurring of string lines and forced, often ill- tuned ensemble. Doubtless the conductor had a clear image of what he wanted, but it rarely emerged for this listener. An exception was the Scherzo of the Seventh Symphony: the repetition of the Trio can make this movement hang rather heavy, but in Gardiner's hands it was both brisk and witty throughout.

The second new initiative of the weekend was yet another new commission from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. New works emerge with creditable regularity from this quarter, but David Lang's My Evil Twin was a commission with a difference. Some of the money had been raised, through the group's Sound Investment scheme, from a number of schools.

What these youthful patrons got for their money was an audience-friendly work that went down very well with those who came to hear it. Although it set out to examine the relationship between the dark and light sides of the composer's psyche, Lang's piece did not really plumb any depths. The fabric of the work is an alternation between minimalist shadowed fragments. Longer melodic lines seem to form something of a superstructure for more aggressive outbursts. The result is a work that purrs along with colourful confidence.

The hint of the light-weight in Lang's piece was compounded somewhat by its arrival in the presence of three 20th-century classics. Perhaps some sophisticated point was being made by the juxtaposing of Webern's Op 24 Concerto and Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks; whatever it was, the impression remained that Webern still stretches an audience more than most, while Stravinsky welcomes the listener in. Amazingly, Matthias Bamert managed to bring an almost romantic dimension to the slow movement of Dumbarton Oaks without sacrificing an ounce of humour.

Still more impressive was his way with Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony Op 9. This work is something of a warhorse in Birmingham these days, but some strange rhythmic alchemy on Bamert's part brought extraordinary vitality to the fast music in a reading that managed to be both revolutionary and romantic.