The Festival Hall's resident symphony orchestras have had to adapt their programming during the venue's renovations, since they've been banished to its smaller neighbour; however, that doesn't mean the most sumptuous music has been left behind. Indeed, Jiri Belohlavek's concert with the London Philharmonic seized the romantic repertoire by the throat.

You can't start a programme much more luxuriantly than with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and here the orchestra raised the bar to a height that none of the rest of the performance quite reached. Belohlavek conducted the LPO in the complete opera at Glyndebourne three summers ago, and his rapport with them is clearly still in place. He held the silence after the first phrase for as long as he dared. Thereafter he notched up the intensity gradually but unstoppably, reaching a summit at the climax of the Prelude, and then, in the Liebestod, allowing it a slow but conclusive release.

Even after such a heady start, Dvorak's Violin Concerto should have continued to spin out the romantic thread - but Isabelle Faust was perhaps not the right soloist to accomplish this. Her playing was far from cold, but it could still be clinical, and the satisfying muscle and dexterity she brought to the opening of the first movement didn't transform into the nostalgically expressive playing that the slow movement's most wistful moments really demand.

With Brahms' First Symphony, Belohlavek took a more aggressive grip on the programme. The first movement had an angry, almost laboured energy that held no danger of the music spiralling into abandon; again, the slow movement went resolutely unmilked. Yet as the third bubbled fleetly along, its middle section almost like a Czech dance, his sense of the work's architecture began to reveal itself. The horn and flute soared magnificently through their solos in the introduction to the finale, for which Belohlavek had ensured the orchestra had enough in reserve to provide even that weighty first movement with a fulfilling balance.