Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony ended their European tour last week with a residency in Bonn, where their cycle of the Beethoven symphonies was the centrepiece of the Beethovenfest held there every September. Now they are repeating their performances for their home audience in Birmingham, with all nine symphonies played in chronological order and packed into four concerts in just six days.

The second concert consisted of the Fourth and Fifth, given as an afternoon matinee. Both symphonies were electrically charged affairs and, after eight weeks of Proms in the cotton-wool acoustics of the Albert Hall, returning to the immediacy and precision of sound in the crowded Symphony Hall was a delight in itself.

Nelsons’ treatment of the Fourth was startling. Like all outstanding conductors, he has the precious ability to conjure something unexpectedly brilliant out of thin air. He did it a year ago in another matinee concert with the CBSO in Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, and Beethoven’s Fourth here was cut from the same cloth. Its slow introduction seemed pregnant with dramatic possibilities, and what followed exploited most of them, with every rhythm sprung, every chord perfectly balanced, the perpetuum mobile of the finale fabulously precise, and Nelsons’ repertoire of podium gestures becoming ever more extravagant: a star jump, arms aloft, both feet well off the ground, was a new one to me.

The Fifth may not have been on quite the same exceptional level, but it was still thrilling, more a force of nature than a tragic or fate-haunted statement. With a first movement that seemed to pivot about the lingering oboe solo that interrupts the first movement’s recapitulation, and a transition into the finale that brought the best from Nelsons’ dramatic instincts, it managed to seem fresh and reinvented – no small thing in such a familiar work.

• Final concerts Saturday and Sunday. Box office: 0121 345-0499.