The conventional critical yardsticks of the concert hall simply do not apply in a place like St Paul's Cathedral, where the London Symphony Orchestra played this closing concert of this year's City of London festival. The setting is, of course, overwhelming: the splendour of the architecture and the intensity of the place. But there are minuses, too. In particular, the way the sound rolls and echoes through the nave long after it has left the orchestra. This creates an imposing effect, difficult to encounter elsewhere and undeniably remarkable, but at the expense of clarity.

Valery Gergiev has conducted in this setting often enough by now to know the rewards and the perils of such exercises, but he would not keep returning here if he did not find the experience rewarding. There was certainly something almost improvisatory about the gradually swelling sound he coaxed from the LSO in Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten at the start of the programme, proving it an ideal work for such an occasion.

Bruckner's symphonies are sometimes dubbed cathedrals of sound, and many of them were composed at the organ in the baroque church of St Florian near Linz, Austria. In Gergiev's hands, the Ninth Symphony certainly worked in this vast space, though inevitably not in the usual way. The remorseless ascent of the first movement from darkness to light worked powerfully, as the waves of sound built towards the movement's blazing climax. Yet the fierce rhythmic drive of the scherzo, normally so remorseless and unrelenting, inevitably came off worse, creating more of an impressionistic blur.

The closing adagio was more compelling and here, at last, the cathedral's wash of sound even seemed to enhance the effect. As Bruckner's discords resolved into the long golden glow of the closing brass chord, the cathedral felt a very appropriate venue after all.