{TABLE} Marriage of Figaro Overture .................. Mozart Cello Concerto ............................... Dvorak Symphony No 4 ................................ Brahms {/TABLE} ONE of the pleasures of concert going at the start of last, year was a first encounter with the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. Sokolov's performance was not enhanced by the conductor on that occasion, and the man in question, Stefan Sanderling, returned to the NCH last Friday, showing no more communality of spirit with his soloist than in 1996.

This time, however, the results were far more disruptive of the piece involved, Dvorak's Cello Concerto, and the soloist, Steven Isserlis. Isserlis is not to put it bluntly, the loudest of cellists, nor is his manner, in this particular piece either direct or conventional.

The fluidity of his playing, the unusual balance of light and shade, the impetuous boldness of some of the phrasing, were all hard to assess in the face of heavy handed conducting, which paid insufficient attention to the audibility of the soloist and his idiosyncratic rubato.

Worse was to come in Brahms's Fourth Symphony. Under Sanderling, the first movement had something of the character of a lumbering, ominous introduction, rather than the feeling of a movement in its own right. With the exception of the brassily lit third movement, ponderousness reigned and the music sagged as under some appalling leaden weight. The effect was as of, a symphony meaninglessly dismembered into a sequence of motivic bones.

Perhaps an orchestra of massive tone, impeccable sectional balances high internal clarity and a naturally faultless singing line could have made sense of Sanderling's purpose. The NSO's responses were rough and not always well co ordinated and the conductor's approach sounded merely uncouth.