A new chief executive may be in post, but the words "piss-up" and "brewery" still spring to mind whenever the South Bank Centre tries to plan for the future. Last night's concert, the first of two by the Vienna Philharmonic this week, was supposed to start with an acoustic test, a preliminary to remodelling the sound of the Festival Hall, but with orchestra and audience in place, the hardware didn't function; everyone sat in silence before defeat was admitted, and the concert could start as normal. The test was successful after the interval - a series of descending electronic whistles intended to build up a profile of the hall - but the embarrassment was surely considerable.
It's fashionable to be rude about the sound of the RFH, but after two months listening to proms in the overgrown bathroom that is the Albert Hall a return to its dryness and directness is a positive pleasure, and with the Vienna Philharmonic on the platform there was certainly no lack of tonal warmth. That richness was a mixed blessing in Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony - fine for the silken delivery of the first movement's second theme and the song-without-words of the adagio, but all wrong in the scherzo, in which a smaller body of strings would have galumphed a lot less. Mariss Jansons never conducts a performance that is lacking in interest and involvement but this sounded out of scale, too often as if Mendelssohn had been reorchestrated by Bruckner.
At least a few desks of strings were shed for Haydn's Symphony No 97, but this was still to be a larger-than-life performance: vivid, certainly, and crackling with energy, and containing some marvels of articulation that Jansons induced from all departments. Sumptuousness was far more appropriate in the 1919 suite from Stravinsky's The Firebird. He never allowed the tension to flag for a moment after that: every detail was finely fashioned, every orchestral effect vividly realised.
· Christian Thielemann conducts the Vienna Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020-7960 4242) tonight.
