What a frustrating pianist Evgeny Kissin is! Since his 1984 Moscow début aged 12 it has been evident that he possesses an extraordinary talent.

Yet he so often squanders it in displays of mechanical virtuosity and crashing insensitivity. Both faces were on show in Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor with the LSO on the opening night of their new season.

His first statement of the main theme was a thing of wonder: exquisitely weighted, lovingly phrased, promising all kinds of revelation. There were indeed some illuminating moments later, not least when the piano drifts off into reverie in the distant key of A flat major.

But in the Passionato passage shortly afterwards the tone coarsened and the phrasing became lumpy. By the finale, too much for comfort was being hammered out in the clattering default mode to which Kissin retreats when he has nothing else to say. Nor was he helped by Colin Davis, content to conduct the orchestra on auto-pilot.

Having demonstrated his strengths and weaknesses, Kissin redeemed himself in an encore: Liszt's arrangement of Schumann's song Widmung. Here technical sovereignty and poetic expressivity were at last ideally married.

As though to reclaim the limelight, Davis and the LSO came out with all guns blazing after the interval in Sibelius's Symphony No1 in E minor. But the result was often as coarse as the piano playing in the first half.

There was certainly no lack of spirit from the LSO, but their characteristic polish, subtlety and homogeneity were in distressingly short supply.