John Eliot Gardiner's reputation for rethinking the canons of classical and romantic music is unassailable, but his concert with the London Symphony Orchestra presented him with a different challenge: to reimagine 20th-century masterpieces by Britten, Debussy and Prokofiev.

Gardiner brought a special fastidiousness to the opening bars of Debussy's La Mer. Far from an impressionistic wash of sound, this was an incisive analysis of orchestral texture, in which every layer was audible: the slowly undulating chords of the strings, the haunting melody of the cor anglais and the delicate chiming of the harp. Instead of painting a picture of waves and currents, Gardiner depicted individual plumes of spray - the fine detail of Debussy's orchestration.

For all its fascination, however, this forensic approach did not communicate the work's expressive power. The second movement, The Play of the Waves, was prim rather than playful, and the final Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea was more a genteel musical contrast than an elemental conflict between opposing forces. The LSO did not sound at its sumptuous best, as if the players were not responding to Gardiner's low-key interpretation.

There was another marine invocation in Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Here again, though, Gardiner could not find the rich soundworld of these depictions of man's relationship with the sea. The ambiguous atmosphere of the opening Dawn and the eerie calm of Moonlight sounded limp in his hands. Although the final Storm had a coarse drama, this was a curiously landlocked performance.

However, Gardiner's interpretation of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony conveyed the work's power and logic. Prokofiev creates a properly symphonic argument in this piece, which is built from a web of thematic connections and dramatic contrasts. The tenor of the whole work is hopeful and uplifting, in keeping with its prediction of Russian victory in the second world war (the symphony was composed in 1944 as a conscious attempt to lift the people's morale).

Gardiner relished the darker moments in the score as much as its unbridled optimism - the lugubrious tread of harp and piano chords in the Adagio and the volatile energy of the Scherzo. Even more striking was the finale, which generated an unstoppable momentum with its endlessly repeated melodies. The musical machine set up by Prokofiev finally spun out of control in the coda, in a wild confrontation between solo strings and the rest of the orchestra: a conclusion that was both heroic and manic.