Symphony No 1 - Sibelius

Symphonie fantastique - Berlioz

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's last visit to Dublin in 1985 was made in the wake of a crisis - the abrupt departure of music director Andre Previn and his replacement, as "music consultant", by Lorin Maazel. On the evidence of last night's appearance in the NCH/The Sunday Business Post International Orchestral Series, things have improved a lot since then.

Maazel went on to become the orchestra's music director, and he was succeeded in 1997 by Mariss Jansons. The orchestra is now an altogether better-rounded and finer-balanced ensemble than was heard here 14 years ago.

In Sibelius's First Symphony, often played - or rather played-up - for its echoes of Tchaikovsky, Jan sons showed the sort of approach that Irish music lovers remember fondly in Sibelius from the late Bryden Thomson. The motto might well have been "Everything must connect". Jansons concentrated on tautness of argument and balance of logic, all carried off through precision of observation. The music, particularly the opening movement, gains in stature when the composer's word is taken as literally as it was on this occasion.

Berlioz's Symphonie fantas tique, the only other work in a concerto-less programme, was far more generous in the opportunities it afforded the orchestra to show off the strengths of its various departments. But here, paradoxically, Jansons seemed less willing to trust the composer.

The Symphonie fantastique doesn't need, nor indeed does it benefit from, the tricksy tempo changes that Jansons slipped in. Nor is there any benefit to be had from locating the four timpani offstage at the end of the Scene in the country. And the striking individuality of the scoring was diminished by the conductor's efforts to make the piece, with its long-breathed phrases and unexpected and sometimes garrulous interruptions, function like the conventional symphony that it most definitely is not.

But as an orchestral showcase, incisive, colourful, urbane, it worked a treat.