Then came the Tchaikovsky, and we were reminded once again what a romantic soul lurks under Oramo’s rather correct exterior. He took the big cello melody with luxuriant slowness, but it was so beautifully shaped that it never dragged.

When the angry music of the opening returned, Oramo created an electric tension, so that when tragedy finally enveloped the music it felt like the crack of doom. It was a terrific curtain-raiser to the season.

It was a shame the musical temperature dropped so markedly in the following piece, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The soloist, young Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, was playing the piece for the first time, and there was an earnestness to her performance which was touching in itself.

The problem was that the piece’s very delicate inwardness eluded her, just because she made such strenuous efforts to grasp it. Her basic tempo in the first movement was dangerously slow, in a way which made the main melody seem plodding rather than flowing, and she had an unfortunate way of pulling back the ending of every phrase.

Later in the skittish fast movement she missed the humour, and made heavy weather of the little hesitations marked in the score – they need to be tossed off lightly. Only in the deeply nostalgic closing pages did she seem to be getting close the music’s heart, but by then it felt too late.