The first half of Daniel Harding's second concert as principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra placed Berg's Violin Concerto alongside Dvorak's rarely performed "orchestral ballad", the Golden Spinning Wheel. The juxtaposition proved telling, if only because it highlighted the streak of dark morbidity, often overlooked, in Dvorak's temperament.

Both works are about women who died young, yet whose spirits are allowed a posthumous voice in music. Berg's great elegy was triggered by the death, from polio, of Manon Gropius, the teenage daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband, Walter Gropius. Dvorak's ballad drags us through a ghastly narrative about a murdered woman whose bones are formed into the eponymous spinning wheel.

Harding has always done the Second Viennese School rather well, and the Berg was mightily impressive, if on the cool side. The orchestral textures were carefully shaded and judged, with some exquisitely sorrowing sounds from wind and brass. The soloist was Frank Peter Zimmerman, whose flawless use of ebbing and flowing vibrato suggested an eager vitality under constant threat from mortality.

Dvorak, however, allows Harding to play to his primary weakness as a conductor, namely a fondness for overemphatic exaggeration. The Golden Spinning Wheel is a wretchedly episodic score, a flaw aggravated by Harding's stop-start approach, with every false ending treated like some grand final peroration.

After the interval came Dvorak's New World Symphony - an in-your-face performance, with sforzando chords like cannon fire. It was crudely effective, but woefully lacking in subtlety.