Among young conductors ascending the career ladder via appointments with the BBCNOW, the Estonian Olari Elts is worth noting.

Nattily dressed and one of the concert platform’s histrionic livewires, this winner of the Sibelius Conductors Competition and principal guest conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra arrived in Cardiff facing a whirlpool.

He entered it with the opening number, Szymanowski’s Concert Overture, as stirring a send-off as any concertgoer could wish for and one of those works pitched beyond what a full symphony orchestra might reasonably be expected to be pursuing in terms of where music was headed at the time.

It’s Richard Strauss on adrenalin and apart from an episode revealing the composer’s sensual side it barely lowers its energy levels, often failing to avoid congealed textures in the rushes of excitement.

Szymanowski had calmed down by the time of the Second Violin Concerto, when that ecstatic mood prevails for long periods and clarity prevails, especially in the use of folk elements both lyrical and dance-like.

It was perfect for the soloist, Tasmin Little, one of our most accomplished fiddlers in the soaring late-Romantic repertory. The concerto’s central cadenza , with its relentless double-stopping, was a tad deliberate, but she recovered to spin into relatively calmer waters.

Elts came into his own in the Brahms First Symphony, demanding urgent tempos, deeply-dug sonorities and relieving lightnesses of touch, avoiding the construction of something laboured and unwieldy. It was a lesson in following the best elements of earlier, traditional approaches, so that the performance caught some of the swirling spirit of the Szymanowski works.