Schumann's Violin Concerto is a curious work with an even more curious history: the tale of its genesis reads like one of Edgar Allan Poe's more lurid fantasies. Within a year of completing the score, Schumann's mental health finally gave way; in his derangement he claimed that Schubert's ghost had dictated the concerto's slow movement. Schumann's widow, Clara, refused to publish the piece and it languished in obscurity until the 1930s, when it was taken up by the virtuoso Jelly d'Aranyi, who claimed a psychic told her to rediscover the score.

This tale, combined with Clara's argument that the concerto was inferior to the rest of Schumann's output, has prevented its wide acceptance. This performance, with Daniel Harding conducting the London Symphony and the orchestra's leader Gordon Nikolitch as soloist, allowed us an opportunity for reassessment.

Although the tumultuous opening and the drooping, obsessive slow movement are indicative of Schumann's depression, the concerto emerges more as a flawed experiment than as the product of mental instability. There are no cadenzas and the violin line, though atrociously difficult, is symphonically integrated with the orchestra rather than dramatically wedged against it. Only the finale betrays lapses in inspiration. The performance itself, however, was hit and miss - Nikolitch's lyrical dexterity sat uneasily with Harding's overemphatic, hard-driven approach.

After the interval came Mahler's Fourth Symphony, a performance hampered by Harding's need to emphasise detail at the expense of cumulative sweep. The tempos of the first two movements were extensively pulled about. The slow movement occasionally aspired to exaggerated stasis, and the symphony's ambiguous analysis of the relationship between innocence and suffering only surfaced in the final movement, with Lisa Milne's cruelly exquisite depiction of the child's view of paradise. Harding becomes the LSO's principal guest conductor next year; the jury is still out on whether his appointment is ideal.