Lost verve

In his two weekend concerts with his fellow Californians of the San Francisco Symphony, his leadership was uninspiring and only intermittently engaging. On Saturday they began with Charles Ives's hymn-based Symphony No 3, The Camp Meeting, and failed to make anything memorable of its wide-eyed naivety: unimaginative phrasing merely made it dull.

The final scene of Strauss's Salome had a bit more spark, but was still underwhelming. Perhaps Tilson Thomas was restraining his forces in order not to drown the soloist, Deborah Voigt.

From where I was sitting the balance was acceptable but Voigt, too - for all that she projected some sense of the dramatic situation - failed to thrill or curdle the blood.

Only with Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony did conductor and orchestra really impress. Subtle phrasing and an original approach to expressive ambiguities made this a rewarding interpretation. Worthy of note was the way the tender descending theme near the beginning emerged from the ether.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony posed all its usual problems the following night, but Tilson Thomas elicited a suitably nightmarish atmosphere for the sequence of fleeting images that make up the Scherzo.

The second Night Music that followed had some judiciously balanced textures - guitar and mandolin serenading discreetly - with just the right element of unsettling quaintness.

The enigmatic, quality of the whole symphony finds a bizarre resolution in the constant gear-changes of the finale. Tilson Thomas did well to keep it all on course, ending with a riotous eruption for full orchestra, complete with cowbells.

BBC Proms: San Francisco Symphony/Thomas
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP