It’s hard to recall hearing Festival Hall applause more lukewarm in sound than the dutiful spattering of hands greeting the first British concert performance of Matthias Pintscher’s Five Orchestral Pieces. You could see the conductor, Christoph Eschenbach, weighing his options. Should I keep bowing? Or cut and run?

He must be used to it. Eschenbach loves to put beloved classics and thorny moderns cheek by jowl, a trick that Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, thorny and daring in its day, openly invites.

But where Beethoven resolves his shrieking dissonances and structural fissures into peals of harmonious joy, Pintscher’s latterday expressionist canvas – the Geman composer’s first big success in 1997 – obdurately resolves nothing. You’re shot into deep space for 25 minutes, without rudder, without sat-nav, adrift among exploding asteroids, twinkling dust, circling junk from a Russian space station. Frightening.

But also exhilarating, especially if you pick up on Pintscher’s spatial games and the delicately dappled scoring, present even in the fiercest pages. With Eschenbach’s help, the London Philharmonic mastered the intricacies with tremendous panache, from brief piccolo screams and percussive shivers to microtone smears and ogling brass.

At the end, a muffled funeral procession. Death of the universe, it felt like. I was glad to hear such a bold account of a bold work, though I wouldn’t have minded it being shorter.

After the interval, refreshed and consoled, we all settled down to Beethoven. Wild applause this time, ear-piercing whistles, too. But underneath the surface excitements lay problems.

Eschenbach conducted the Ninth Symphony as if it were also by Pintscher, or perhaps Edgard Varèse. The same tight phrasing, the extreme dynamics, the lunges into sonic battering. But where was a feeling for organic growth, of emotional or spiritual engagement? Beethoven’s ructions and huzzahs should proceed like a force of nature, raw, untrammelled; Eschenbach gave us a course of modern engineering.

Given the chilly clarity and rigour, it was cheering when small imperfections poked through the Ode to Joy: imprecise trumpeting, an overdeclamatory Evgeny Nikitin, a lusty but slightly erratic London Philharmonic Choir.

Warmth and humanity at last! Not the brilliant, implacable grinding of a machine.

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