Over the years, Colin Davis has evolved into one of classical music's great individualists - a quality never more apparent than in this idiosyncratic but wonderful London Symphony Orchestra concert. On paper, the programme looked strange. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven's Eighth were followed, after the interval, by Stravinsky's Firebird. The concert's two halves seemed curiously disconnected, unless one takes into account the fact that both the Unfinished Symphony and Firebird open with a low growl on cellos and double basses, prophetic of turbulence to follow.

However, Davis brought his formidable intelligence to bear on each work, with results that were never less than startling - or, for some, fazing. He used unfashionably colossal forces for Schubert and Beethoven, investing both works with unusual gravity. The brevity of the Beethoven, combined with its quirky reworking of classical structure, has caused some commentators to see it as a joke. But Davis was anything but humorous, unleashing a torrent of high Romantic emotion giving the work an exceptional, if inappropriate density. Schubert's Unfinished, meanwhile, is often seen as eccentric and peripheral, though Davis stresses its centrality in the Austro- German tradition, its echoes of Mozart and its prefiguration of Wagner and Mahler.

His Firebird, meanwhile, was exceptional. Davis is well aware of the ambivalence at the work's core - namely that Stravinsky's burgeoning modernism is placed at the service of the demonic elements in the ballet's narrative, while Romantic nostalgia is equated with forces of spiritual light. His performance is darker in tone than most, closer to the hallucinatory world of Dostoevsky than the comfort of a classic fairy tale - a beautiful, shocking and overwhelming experience.