Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis is regarded as Lithuania’s foremost visual artist, as well as one of its leading composers. Although he died at just 35, in 1911, Čiurlionis left more than 400 musical works and 300 paintings. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s latest concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra began with the first British performance of her countryman’s tone poem, The Sea.

Completed in 1903 and lasting more than half an hour, The Sea is clearly modelled on Strauss’s symphonic poems, especially Also Sprach Zarathustra, though the music also hints at early Sibelius, and perhaps even Debussy. The composer detailed the stormy narrative in a prose poem that was reprinted in the concert programme, but it left an impression of unfocused succession of brassy climaxes, with too few quiet interludes between them. Čiurlionis’s musical talent was undeniable, but here his ambition seems to overwhelm his ability to organise his ideas.

The score was played with sumptuous refinement and authority by the CBSO, as was the sequence of numbers from Grieg’s incidental music to Peer Gynt (with Klara Ek as the supple soprano soloist) that followed it. Unfortunately, the performance had an extra visual element – not projections of some of Čiurlionis’s paintings, but a “kinetic painting” created during the performance by Norman Perryman, the Birmingham-born artist whose depictions of famous musicians are familiar from the foyers of Symphony Hall. Rather than enhancing the music, though, Perryman’s images – abstract washes painted on glass and projected on to a screen behind the orchestra – only diverted attention from a totally unfamiliar score. It was impossible to concentrate on both.