There may be more than one way of playing Beethoven, but Daniel Barenboim set a benchmark when opening his sonata cycle earlier in the week that will not easily be surpassed. Hélène Grimaud, tackling the Emperor Concerto with the Philharmonia in the same hall, had a lot to live up to.

Rarely does Grimaud disappoint: the insistently communicative quality of her playing is the benign musical equivalent of being doorstepped by the JWs. But on this occasion her charisma largely deserted her.

There was another problem. Whatever the spurious status of the concerto's nickname, it has an undeniably imperial grandeur. Neither Grimaud nor the conductor, Kirill Karabits, seemed keen to luxuriate in heroic self-satisfaction but in constantly pushing on in pursuit of a more dynamic approach they sacrificed the spaciousness and opulence the work surely demands. The result was too often pedestrian.

Grimaud created more space for herself in a rapt meditation on the hymn-like theme of the Adagio, while the volcanic reading of the finale was convincingly projected.

The young Karabits, standing in for Paavo Jarvi, has a fluent stick technique and coaxed a suitably phantasmagoric account of Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain from the Philharmonia.

Sibelius's Second Symphony was more intermittently successful, its best moments being the icy Nordic blasts concluding the Andante and the triumphal peroration of the whole work: a seismic shift generated by the full orchestra, crowned by pealing brass.