Mark Elder is about to immerse himself in Shostakovich, contributing to the centenary festival in Manchester with the Hallé. If his concert with the London Philharmonic omitted that composer it did open with an acknowledgement of next week's Mozart anniversary with a wonderful urgent account of Symphony No 34 in C. The Queen Elizabeth Hall acoustic never flatters string tone, but Elder gave the sound a reedy edge by placing the woodwind (an oboe and two bassoons) directly in front of his podium as if they were a concertante group.

The rest of the concert maintained the same intimate, chamber-music qualities. Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder were played in the orchestrations that Hans Werner Henze made 30 years ago, in which the textures are opened out and line rather than harmony is the first priority. Though an alto flute is included, the scoring is generally quite subdued, with just the occasional remarkable touch. The pair of muted horns for the final cadential phrase of the second song Stehe Still!, and the absence of violins in the third Im Treibhaus, mean that the sinewy textures seem to anticipate early Schoenberg. But Anna Larsson's sumptuous singing, immaculately articulated and wondrously smooth, was a treat in itself.

After a punchy account of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, there was another treat to end the programme - Strauss's Metamorphosen, with Elder observing the composer's own description of the work as a "study for 23 solo strings" and treating the ensemble as a group of soloists, with violins and violas all standing to deliver their parts. It was a performance of wonderful ebb and flow, with skeins of string sound constantly changing their colour and texture. It wasn't a Karajan-style exercise in plush tone and romantic rhetoric, but something much more personal and introspective, which made Strauss seem an altogether more interesting, and ambiguous, 20th-century composer.

· Repeated tonight. Box office: 0870 060 6010.