Back when he was better known for his music reviews than his music, Schumann described his ideal concerto: one in which orchestra and pianist would be combined, complementary. Mitsuko Uchida is the pianist of his dreams. It's rare to find a soloist so obviously virtuosic yet so unselfish in performance.

Uchida was performing Schumann's Piano Concerto, a work in which the composer convincingly realised those youthful ideals. When the music demanded, she easily emerged as the focus of attention; otherwise, her playing melded seamlessly into the LSO's fluid ensemble. Not that she didn't take a controlling role: Colin Davis was on the podium, but it was Uchida's arresting opening statement and the sweet, wistful passage that followed that laid down the emotional parameters for the first movement more clearly than any conductor could. In the slow movement, she provided flighty counterbalance to the earnestly romantic cello melody, and her delicate music-box touch made the third movement skim by.

Curiously, the two works that framed the Schumann will be doing the same for a violin concerto on one of the LSO's December programmes. Either the management is confident that its core audience will be on tenterhooks to hear these again, or it thinks they have the memory of goldfish.

It's fortunate, then, that both performances would on balance be worth hearing twice, though neither could be called definitive. Davis's interpretation of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings may be less consistently dynamic than some, and the opening section was especially weighty. Yet he shaped it with all the care this small masterpiece deserves, and the light-footed, brisk fugue found the LSO strings at their best.

Similarly, Walton's First Symphony: Davis didn't push the motoring rhythms, but neither did he settle for allowing this huge, Sibelius-inspired score to sound brittle or merely noisy, and the haunting slow movement had a compelling emotional intensity.