The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday March 1 2004

In the review below, we incorrectly said the viola player was Paul Silverthorne. It was Edward Vanderspar. Apologies.

Less than a fortnight after the London Symphony Orchestra was turning out glossy, armour-plated Richard Strauss for Antonio Pappano, it tackled the composer again. This time the conductor was Franz Welser-Möst and the Strauss work Don Quixote, with Tim Hugh as the cello protagonist and Paul Silverthorne as his viola-playing Sancho Panza.

Their excellence apart, however, this concert was no more convincing than the earlier one. There is something hard-bitten about the sound of the LSO at the moment, as if sentiment was being applied by numbers. And Welser-Möst is not the larger-than-life personality to impose a character on the orchestra's playing from the podium.

Since his spell as the London Philharmonic's music director in the early 1990s, Welser-Möst has become a rare visitor to the capital. From 1995 to 2002 he was music director at the Zurich Opera, and from there he moved to the Cleveland Orchestra. Those who remember his rather unimpressive performances with the LPO were surprised when he landed one of the most prestigious jobs in American music, and so this pair of concerts with the LSO - he conducts a bizarre coupling of Sibelius and Mozart at the Barbican tomorrow - offered a chance to catch up with the development of someone who, by conducting standards, is still near the beginning of his career.

If Welser-Möst's Strauss was ordinary - and when Don Quixote is given an ordinary performance, it seems very long indeed - his account of Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony was far better. Most of the rehearsal time seemed to have been spent upon it, for a start, and Welser-Möst made a convincing case for the work's slow/ fast/faster scheme. The tragedy of the opening Largo was underlined impressively and steered back to its starting point with majestic spaciousness, while the second movement was unleashed as a ferocious danse macabre. The finale had a dark subtext beneath its high spirits. Decent enough, then, but not compelling evidence either way of the conductor's true qualities.