The City of Birmingham Symphony's centenary is 10 years away, but the ­orchestra already has it in its sights. Each year until 2020 its programmes will make a special feature of works from exactly 100 years ago, eventually tracing out the whole musical history of what was one of the most exceptional decades of the 20th century. This year the focus is on 1910, and so Edward Gardner's all-English programme began with Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Gardner prefaced the Vaughan Williams with a brass arrangement of Tallis's original theme, and did as much as he could to enhance the work's ­in-built spatial effects by ­placing the second string orchestra off stage and increasing Symphony Hall's ­reverberation as much as he dared. Even so, it couldn't have come close to the ­cavernous acoustic of Gloucester ­Cathedral, where the Fantasia was first performed and, coincidentally, where Gardner himself was a boy chorister.

Perhaps for that reason, everything remained a bit chilly and distant, ­presented as a beautiful object that revealed each of its facets in turn, even though the CBSO string playing was as refined as anyone could have wanted. Balancing the Fantasia at the opposite end of the programme was Elgar's Enigma Variations, full of deliciously crisp woodwind detail, though even that seemed never quite to be let off the emotional leash.

Between the perennial favourites came a pair of concertante pieces. The CBSO's principal viola, Christopher Yates, was the perfectly polished soloist in Britten's introspective, Dowland-based Lachrymae, while Alison Balsom took on James MacMillan's single-movement trumpet concerto from 1993, Epiclesis. Balsom's virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever.