Valery Gergiev, never one for abstemious planning, tends to go big in Edinburgh. He is honorary president of the international festival so there’s a prerogative. Recent editions have seen him stage symphonic cycles and epic operas craned in from St Petersburg. This year he closed the festival with the London Symphony Orchestra in The Rite of Spring and The Miraculous Mandarin, plus the brawn and big heart of Yefim Bronfman in Bartók – in other words, a programme of orchestral dazzle designed to leave us on a high.

But what we got was Gergiev at his most lackadaisical as well as his most sensationally insightful. The concert suite from Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin was weirdly listless – not an adjective belonging anywhere near this tale of grotesque and brutal wizardry. Bronfman was lyrical and uncluttered in the lucid textures of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto but Gergiev’s accompaniment was lukewarm: he never matched the pianist’s care or colours.

The Rite, though, was gripping. One of Gergiev’s legacies at the LSO will be the stunning autonomy of the orchestra’s sections (try following his wobbly beat for a minute and you’ll understand why). It’s an astoundingly forthright band, with a hefty, glossy sound and bulletproof ensemble, and though Stravinsky’s writing should never sound easy, here the razor-sharp precision was riveting.

This account was deadpan but clinched the pivot between sensuality and brutality. Gergiev gave bassoonist Rachel Gough full licence to beguile in her opening solo and evoked deep longing from the emphatic bass notes of Spring Rounds and casual swing in the Evocation of the Ancestors. Meanwhile the stabbing chords in Ritual of Abduction were merciless and the Sacrificial Dance had terrifying momentum. There wasn’t the savagery or abandon to shock in obvious ways, but the steel-eyed fatalism and nonchalant violence left a deeper kind of chill.