Comparisons between orchestras can be unfair - different concert halls and conductors, different repertoire - but they are sometimes hard to resist. Hearing the London Symphony Orchestra tackle a programme of Richard Strauss at the Barbican when the sound of the Philharmonia's Dvorak at the Festival Hall was still fresh in the ears was salutary. No one would say the RFH acoustic flatters anyone, yet the depth and refinement of the Philharmonia's tone was in sharp contrast to the shallow brilliance that the LSO manufactured for Antonio Pappano.

The hard-baked gloss that was indiscriminately applied to every climax did Strauss's cause no favours at all. Pappano is an expert at giving dynamic shape and urgency to such music, whether it be the febrile struggles at the heart of Tod und Verklärung, or the macho swagger of Ein Heldenleben. But it was a rather soulless experience; even if you do not subscribe entirely to Hans Keller's view that where other composers had a heart, Strauss had a pool of sentimentality, after an assault like this it would be hard not to believe there was at least a grain of truth in such an assertion.

Technically, of course, the orchestral playing was first class - well-balanced and intelligently articulated. The transparency of the strings in the opening pages of Tod und Verklärung had been textbook perfect, and all the strands in the last section of Heldenleben (beneath which Strauss surely conceals a quotation from the Eroica Symphony) were mixed in the right proportions. There were diverting moments - Gordon Nikolitsch's violin solos in Heldenleben nicely mixed schmaltz and capriciousness, and there was some wondrously secure brass playing - yet there was too much machine-like relentlessness, too much insistent point-making. The only moments of relaxation came between the two symphonic poems, when David Pyatt was the admirably suave, perfectly controlled soloist in the Second Horn Concerto.