A rum cove sidles up pimping with a tatty business card offering the services of Sonyetka. Not for me, I say, pointing out that in any case she’ll be dead three hours later. "That's more than I know," he says and wanders off to hook other possible clients. Further on, rodent-headed creatures flit by. One seems to be in an altercation with a Rentokil officer. Odd, too, that there should be policemen parading the disco-lit, dilipidated Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir.

British concert audiences now know and love one great Lithuanian, among the most communicative and individual conductors in the world today (note I don't even need to prefix "conductors" with "women"). On Saturday night, Lithuania's Independence Day passing untrumpeted save for a flag-wave or two, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla introduced lucky Birmingham listeners to an ambitious orchestral tone-poem by another, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), the country's national hero among composers.

In the fourth performance of their UK tour, with Vassily Sinaisky replacing an indisposed Yuri Temirkanov, the St Petersburg Philharmonic gave a warm and rousing performance at Symphony Hall, Birmingham.

Well, I didn’t expect that – and judging from the way the rest of the audience reacted, nor did anyone else. After Cristian Măcelaru slammed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra full speed into the final chord of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, there was a stunned silence, broken by gasps. And then cheers, as a smiling, visibly drained Măcelaru gestured back at the orchestra with both thumbs up.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's latest dynamo of a music director and communication incarnate, doesn't believe in taking it easy.

There’s always a special atmosphere when the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra returns to Birmingham Town Hall, and it’s not just because of the building’s Greek Revival beauty: the gilded sunburst on the ceiling, or the towering, intricately painted mass of the organ, topped with its cameo of Queen Victoria.

Imagine an orchestral concert made up exclusively of contemporary works by living composers: a programme in which every note was written within the last two decades. Imagine not only that this concert is sufficiently popular to fill a 2,000-seat hall with a noticeably youthful and diverse crowd, but that its format is already being replicated regularly by pretty much every major UK symphony orchestra. Now ask yourself how much critical attention such a concert would receive? You wouldn’t be able to pick up the Sunday review supplements for sheer weight of coverage, would you?

A shrewd orchestra maintains a strong subs bench. One of the major discoveries in Birmingham during the interregnum between Andris Nelsons’s premature departure and the appointment of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla was the young Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber, whose taut, ferociously intelligent 2015 account of Brahms’s First Symphony prompted mutterings both inside and outside the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra that he might be The One, or at least capable of running The One very close indeed.

This should have been the third much-anticipated Prom of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's inspiring communicator-in-chief Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. She's now on maternity leave. So those of us who hadn't experienced Ludovic Morlot live before had a chance to witness what a splendid moulder and shaper he is, here in a skilfully co-ordinated all-French programme.

How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly.