Making stylistic connections across the art forms is always a dodgy business, and linking composers with wider aesthetic movements can be a particularly fraught pastime. Yet Debussy is regularly described as a musical impressionist, as if his works were the aural equivalent of Monet and Pissarro; when in fact no more than half a dozen of his pieces, mostly for piano, have any connection at all with that world of colour and sensation.

Yet the tenuousness of those impressionist links did not prevent David Robertson presenting a concert with the BBC Symphony that attempted to make connections between the working methods in three of Debussy's greatest orchestral works - Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune, Jeux and La Mer - and Monet's paintings. Images (from the Mornings on the Seine series and one of the late Waterlilies) were projected on to a screen behind the orchestra, while Robertson drew parallels between harmonic and melodic details in the music and elements of the pictures, before the works were played complete. For La Mer the perspective switched, and some of the series of Japanese woodcuts by Hokusai and Hiroshige that are known to have fired Debussy's imagination were shown instead, as little more than ravishing wallpaper.

It was all curiously inert, distracting rather than insightful. Given the tendentiousness of the connections that's not surprising, and trying to draw any parallels between Jeux and Monet seemed totally misguided. By the time he composed that ballet, Debussy was immersed in the symbolist world, having completed one work with a text by D'Annunzio and sketched two operas based upon Poe, while the hard edges of Jeux, which were emphasised in Robertson's clear but rather stiff performance, show how his music had changed. Dragging Monet into that world seemed just perverse.