Daniel Harding's latest appearance as the London Symphony's chief guest conductor was planned as an all-French programme - Boulez's flute-and-strings Mémoriale, Ravel's G major Piano Concerto and Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony. But when the audience arrived at the hall, they discovered they were getting a bonus - the first performance of Luke Bedford's Outblaze the Sky, the latest in the series of short orchestral pieces that the LSO has been commissioning from British composers.

The orchestra has made a fetish of not announcing these premieres in advance - a dubious idea that seems to be driven by the fear that some of the audience might be deterred by the prospect of hearing nasty contemporary music. Those who got to hear Bedford's piece, then, can count themselves lucky. Inspired by a passage in DM Thomas's The White Hotel, it is a blissfully direct, superbly scored miniature, based on a rotating sequence of luscious chords that generates a surging wave of sound, full of aching glissandos and richly scored textures, as if Scriabin had been reincarnated in the 21st century.

Bedford's totally assured piece provided welcome relief after Lang Lang's profoundly unmusical account of Ravel's G major Piano Concerto. Lang seems to be cultivating his own brand of demonic pianism at the moment, with keyboard movements that could have been copied from a Fritz Lang film, and an attempt to develop menacing Horovitz-like depth charges in the left hand. The trouble is that Horovitz knew when to use such effects and, on this evidence, Lang does not. The outer movements of the Ravel concerto were furiously jagged rather than jaunty, while the exaggerated expressiveness with which the supremely elegant slow movement was adorned was simply vulgar. There is real talent there, as long as Lang realises soon that there is more to being a first-rate pianist than pandering to his band of adoring admirers.