Jonathan Nott has recordings and premieres of major works by Lachenmann, Ligeti and Rihm to his credit, so an 18-minute orchestral display piece by Mark-Anthony Turnage should not have caused him many sleepless nights. In fact, the British premiere of Turnage's Scherzoid, a joint commission between the New York and London Philharmonics, turned out to be the best performance of Nott's concert with the LPO, with athletic strings, assertive woodwind and suitably snarling brass.

That slickness was a tribute to Turnage's expert orchestration, too, for the surface of his music appears to have got more assured as its content has got more predictable. This new piece - constantly fast but changing its mood rapidly through a sequence of scherzos and trios, hence the hybrid title - applies to a fresh template a now familiar repertoire of gestures: jagged rhythmic figures, smeary blues-inflected harmonies, pungent incursions from the soprano saxophone. It could almost be modelled on the scherzo in Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, though Turnage evokes the ghost of Beethoven's Ninth. Whatever its origins, Scherzoid is a piece that should travel well, and orchestras should be relaxed about including it in mainstream programmes.

Here, it was followed with two works by Richard Strauss. Neither, though, really took off. Nott never overlooked an opportunity to project Also Sprach Zarathustra in bold, dramatic shapes, but the overripe textures really need an orchestra with more presence, more bloom and more succulence than the LPO seems able to muster these days.

That lack of orchestral lustre was one of the reasons the Four Last Songs seemed so lifeless; there was no cushion of tone over which the soprano Elizabeth Connell could float her phrases with warmth and amplitude. The higher reaches of Connell's voice had a steely edge that was secure enough but rather inappropriate in these songs, which are designed for a voice with lyrical intensity rather than dramatic power.