Seventy-five years ago, the London Philharmonic made its debut, conducted by Thomas Beecham, who had created the new ensemble. On the exact anniversary, the LPO marked the occasion with its latest music director, Vladimir Jurowski. There was champagne and pink birthday cake for the audience afterwards - but musically, the birthday concert didn't feel much like a celebration.

A new fanfare started things off: a cleverly worked antiphonal affair composed by the LPO's principal horn player, Richard Bissill. Intentionally or not, it carried echoes of an earlier LPO brass player who was also a composer: Malcolm Arnold. Next was Mozart's Prague Symphony, which Beecham had included in that first concert. Though Jurowski gave it a few period touches - using natural horns and trumpets, and observing the second-half repeat in the already long first movement - it was all a bit too serious and workmanlike.

In Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Maurizio Pollini wasn't in a celebratory mood, either. This was as near to routine as such a great pianist ever comes. Everything was where it should be, and there were occasional touches of the crystalline directness that is such a feature of the Pollini style, but the music was never allowed the space to blossom or to acquire any personal inflections; everything stayed at arm's length.

It was only when Jurowski got on to home territory that the concert acquired a bit of flash and pizazz. Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances have become a signature work for him and the orchestra, and they dispatched the three movements with great stylishness, if never probing very deeply beneath the polished surfaces. The playing was first-rate; enlisting Martin Robertson to play the gorgeously yearning saxophone solo in the first movement was a bit of luxury casting that suited the special occasion.