There was no mistaking the musical self-confidence of Esa-Pekka Salonen's concert with his Los Angeles Philharmonic. In a programme of orchestral showpieces, he performed his own LA Variations alongside Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The LA Variations are tailor-made for the LA Phil's glitzy sound: it is all dazzling surface and showy effect, from its melodious opening to the piquant piccolo solo in its final bars. Salonen takes the tricks and techniques of 20th-century orchestral writing - pounding Stravinskian rhythms, voluptuous lines, Messiaen-like colours - and reworks them with exuberant style. The LA players revelled in this homage to their musicality, and Salonen was a hyperactive advocate for his own music.

For all its easy brilliance, LA Variations does not create a vivid emotional journey in the way that the Symphonie Fantastique does. Or rather, should do: Salonen and the LA Phil played Berlioz's masterpiece as if it were another vehicle for their technical prowess rather than a searingly powerful musical narrative. This performance turned their musical strengths into weaknesses: their big, flashy sound lacked real depth, especially in the string playing, and they did not generate the dramatic momentum that the symphony demands. When Berlioz's hero stares over the abyss at the end of the third movement, as the musical motto of the piece hovers above the deathly rumble of four timpani, there was no frisson of fragility or terror in the LA Phil's playing. The whirling dance of the second movement was lumbering and joyless in this performance, and although the March to the Scaffold and the Dream of a Witches' Sabbath were efficiently noisy, Salonen's performance did not realise the grotesque carnival of Berlioz's imagination.