"Titanic" is an adjective frequently applied to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, though the qualities the word suggests - majesty, awe, almost superhuman emotional and spiritual struggle - are all too frequently absent in performance. The great Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, however, seemingly possesses those qualities in spades, and his performance with the London Philharmonic and Kurt Masur proved a remarkable and unique experience.

Pollini's interpretation is conceived on the grandest scale, its epic weight established at the outset as the piano's opening flourishes rear upward with defiant, monumental dignity. Thereafter you are conscious of a formidable intelligence at work, holding fierce emotions in check and subordinating them to Beethoven's relentless structural logic.

Here, grandeur of gesture was paired with expressive finesse. The furious octaves of the first movement gave way to moments of limpidity without disrupting the cumulative drama. The climax of the adagio, in which the soloist finally takes over the strings' hymnic melody, was done with aristocratic hauteur and poise, while the finale was shot through with Dionysiac elation and danger.

Masur, however, took a while to match the white heat of Pollini's playing. The orchestra's first major statement seemed underpowered, and the conductor struck form only when he reached the first movement's development section.

Masur's choice of accompanying material - Britten's Simple Symphony and Prokofiev's Classical Symphony - was curious. Britten's reworking of his own juvenilia as a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood has its awkward moments, and Masur failed to unify the jarring disparities in tone, though the playing from the LSO strings was ravishing. He did, however, show he was aware that there is more to the Classical Symphony than pastiche. It was written in 1917 as the Russian revolution loomed; Masur probed beneath its surface to find rhythmic irregularities and thematic angularity, conjuring up a vision of an ossified courtly world about to be swept away for good.