Symphony No 7 - Sibelius

Three Songs - Mahler

Sheherazade - Ravel

La mer - Debussy

The major London orchestras are infrequent visitors to these shores. And, if the truth be told, their appearances here in the past two decades or so haven't all been of the sort to support the reputations they have long managed to maintain on disc. Monday's British Council-supported appearance of the Philharmonia, making its NCH debut in the NCH/The Sunday Business Post International Orchestral Series, was something of a mixed bag.

Sibelius's seventh and final symphony is as enigmatic a work as the Finnish master ever penned. It challengingly inhabits a world of perpetual becoming, and it's a world which, in performance, can all too easily leave the listener with a sense of anti-climax. Leonard Slatkin and his players seemed on this occasion too concerned to concrete the music through conventional expressive responses.

Frederica von Stade introduced and sang three Mahler songs (Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder, Rheinlegendchen and Lob des hohen Verstandes) in the manner of a seasoned entertainer, that is, with a presentation that depended more on personality than on qualities either purely vocal or musical.

Happily, everything in the evening took a turn for the better after the interval. The playing sharpened in focus and responsiveness, and the singing, too. Von Stade has long shown a special affinity for French repertoire. She has mastered the art of declamation, the compelling marriage of song and speech that is so essential for any performer wishing to enter Ravel's exotic world. And Slatkin guided his players towards a style of sympathetic complementarity - melodic lines floating in delicate tracery, harmonies glowing with muted internal resonances.

The sensitivity to things French was retained in the suggestive surges and strokes of Debussy's La mer, where Slatkin's colouristic sensitivity, careful pacing and climactic restraint paid rich dividends.