Though much of his conducting career has been spent in Europe, Britain hears relatively little of Myung-Whun Chung. From 1989-94 Chung was music director of the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and since 2000 he has been in charge of the Radio France Philharmonic but, apart from the occasional prom and more or less annual visits to the London Symphony, he rarely crosses the Channel and his name is never mentioned when candidates for conducting vacancies here are publicly discussed.

It's our loss, for as Chung's performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony with the LSO showed, his virtues as an orchestral interpreter are considerable and unfussily effective. In many ways this was an exemplary performance, slightly detached, never attempting to impose any spurious programme or to squeeze out more emotional juice from the music than it can comfortably offer. Everything was clear, from the binary nature of the first two movements - the second revisiting the material of the first from a series of different perspectives - through the scherzo that turns the emotional map of the symphony on its head, to the extrovert Rondo, with the famous Adagietto played for what it is meant to be, an extended introduction to that finale rather than a tear-jerking tone poem in its own right.

Before the symphony, Chung and the orchestra had accompanied Yundi Li in Chopin's First Piano Concerto. Li is unquestionably a gifted pianist; he is technically fearless and the clarity of his playing can be dazzling, but - as yet - his musical personality is much harder to assess. There were moments in the first movement of the concerto when the performance promised to turn into something special, but as it went on, those moments got fewer, Li's tone acquired a harder edge, and some of the detail, in the finale especially, was undercharacterised as he pressed on with music that needed more room to breathe.