It is hard to think of two composers less alike than Berlioz and Sibelius, each posing an entirely different set of challenges to his interpreters. Colin Davis is unarguably the greatest Berlioz conductor alive, but he has also conducted Sibelius throughout his orchestral career, regularly returning to the symphonies with new insights and increasing immediacy. That development has been charted in his recordings of them, too; when it is complete, the cycle that is currently being produced from his Barbican performances with the London Symphony Orchestra will be his third - each distinctly different from the others.

To open the LSO's season, Davis tackled the First Symphony, the longest (the earlier programmatic, unnumbered Kullervo excepted) of the canon and the most discursive, in which Sibelius's early admiration for Tchaikovsky is sometimes only thinly disguised. Davis made it as taut and purposeful as the later symphonies, and as structurally cogent. It was certainly a vivid account, but Davis made details tell as much as the symphony's big tragic statements, and drew the thematic threads of the finale together with massive assurance.

The account of Schumann's Piano Concerto that preceded the symphony was far less convincing. The soloist was Evgeny Kissin, who produced as heavy-handed and insensitive an account of this supple, intimate concerto as it's possible to imagine. Kissin's left hand plunged into the bass with the ferocity of a depth charge, the high-register filigree was rattled off with cruel steeliness, every chord had a fierce challenging edge. The approach might have suited Prokofiev; it annihilated Schumann's intimate poetry.