In his new role as president of the London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis's first concert with the orchestra had a sense of seigneurial authority about it. Not many conductors still present Mozart in the grand manner, but Davis launched the Haffner Symphony with a body of strings that could have comfortably sustained a work by Bruckner or Richard Strauss. Thanks to some disciplined playing from the LSO, his approach worked well in the outer movements - after all, Davis has been conducting Mozart like this for half a century - but the slow movement and the minuet lacked buoyancy, plodding where they should have moved along more effortlessly.

Similar forces accompanied the E flat Piano Concerto K482, providing a luxuriant, almost Brahmsian framework for the pearly shading of Emanuel Ax's solo playing. He is a pianist who seems incapable of producing a sound that is not perfectly shaped, and for much of this performance he seemed to be in self-communing mood, as if offering a series of reflections on this expansive concerto rather than engaging with it and the orchestra in a dynamic or purposeful way.

Everything snapped into sharper focus with Elgar's Enigma Variations, as if the orchestra had been waiting to show what it was really capable of. Davis's tempo still tends to be on the slow side: he paid particular attention to the expressive depths of the string writing in variations such as the fifth and sixth, "RPA" and "Ysobel", and in the 12th, "BGN", with its aspiring cello line. But the approach was never sentimental, just fabulously assured, coherent and convincing.

· Broadcast on Classic FM on January 28.