Without making much fuss about it, the Barbican has got itself a modest pre-Easter Elgar festival. The London Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra are involved, and the centrepiece of the three concerts will be a performance of the oratorio The Apostles, which rarely strays so far east of the Severn. That will be conducted by Richard Hickox, who also started the series with the LSO, a programme containing the overture In the South, the song cycle Sea Pictures and Symphony No 2.

Five years ago at the Festival Hall, Hickox conducted a performance of the Second Symphony that, in its spaciousness, drama and structural integration, was the best I have ever heard live. This account never reached those exalted levels, though it did have moments of startling vividness. Those occurred mainly in the last two movements - the menacing scherzo especially, which seemed to respond best to Hickox's unusually brusque and businesslike approach. But the elegiac second movement had clarity rather than a sense of grief; here, the LSO's playing was highly competent rather than openly expressive.

That efficiency had been the tone of the whole concert. For In the South, Elgar's closest approach to the swagger and brilliance of a Strauss tone poem, the gloss was hard-baked; the images were vivid enough, but lacking in a sense of atmosphere. And the settings of Sea Pictures really require a fruity, old-fashioned English contralto rather than Diana Montague's more incisive mezzo. Montague, substituting for Jennifer Larmore, was attentive to all the nuances of the the vocal lines, while Hickox managed to switch the orchestra out of autopilot for the nobilmente climax of the last song.