Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

When Osmo Vänskä left his native Finland in 2004 to become music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, the expectation was that he would pack Sibelius in his bag and repeat in America the successes that had established his name in Europe. But aside from guest appearances in London, we hear little Sibelius from him these days. His reputation and repertoire have grown alongside that of his orchestra, bolstered by recordings that profile the Minnesotans as a disciplined, fine-tuned ensemble.

Their latest European tour should have been a gauge of how the relationship continues to develop, but this visit to the Edinburgh International Festival told us nothing we didn’t already know. The programme consisted of Elgar’s Cello Concerto before the interval and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony after it, with Barber’s atmospheric Music for a Scene from Shelley tacked on at the start: why are touring American orchestras so apologetic about their country’s classical music? In Vänskä’s hands the distance between Barber’s European-style tone poem and Sibelius seemed short. The performance bristled with intensity, reaching its climax in a way that profiled the music’s organic potency.

Their Beethoven was slower and more conventional than it sounds on CD – and far less punchy in rhythm and texture than when Vänskä conducted a memorable Beethoven cycle in the 1990s with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The first movement was stolid, the slow movement sluggish, and even in the Scherzo, his dancing (and at times distracting) motions on the podium did not translate to the playing. Like several other contract orchestras from the US, the impression was not so much of a blend of highly talented individuals, more a well-drilled machine, immune to the stylistic advances that have revolutionised Beethoven interpretation elsewhere.

The soloist in the Elgar concerto was Alisa Weilerstein, whose emotionally lightweight reading was counterbalanced by a highly idiomatic use of portamento (moving from one note to another with an element of slide), gently applied in a way that flattered her less than voluminous tone. (