It is 14 years since Michael Tilson Thomas renounced the principal conductorship of the London Symphony Orchestra and set up camp in San Francisco. But it’s as if he has never been away. The repertoire hasn’t changed a bit: still that fascination, bordering on obsession, with the (admittedly action-packed) 70 years or so between Tchaikovsky’s heyday and Rachmaninov's death. And neither has the suave, nuanced, but perhaps rather too well-behaved music-making.

His interpretation of Debussy’s Images was typical. It shimmered beautifully. As with Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, there were stunning blends of woodwinds and strings, solos delivered with imagination, and a persuasive ebb and flow to the phrasing. But, especially in Ibéria’s climaxes, it all seemed a little tame.

The last work in the programme, Villa-Lobos’s astonishing Choros No 10, Rasga o Coraceo, was a very different matter. How could it not be? Imagine if Carl Orff had relocated his Carmina Burana on Copacabana Beach, thrown in some sound-effects from the rainforest, and been a hundred times more daring in his harmonies, and you’ll have some idea of what this 15-minute thriller sounds like.

Half of it is preparation: the orchestra flexing its most exotic sonorities in a series of fitful solos. But then, like a volcano erupting, a thumping rhythm breaks out and the chorus (the LSO Chorus in pulsating form) starts a wild, samba-like rhythm before launching one of those Brazilian melodies so insidiously catchy that it was still on my brain at 3am the next morning. Exhilarating stuff. Now can we hear all of Villa-Lobos’s other Choros?

A sensation of a different kind appeared just before that. Yuja Wang is 22, Chinese, very slender, very pretty; and she flutters across the ivories like a supercharged butterfly. Naturally she is a hit in America, and her dainty yet mercurial rendition of the fast passagework in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G showed why. But equally, the prosaic, almost painfully inexpressive way in which she opened the magical slow movement suggested that — like her compatriot Lang Lang — she flounders when confronted with music requiring profundity rather than panache. Let’s hope that she finds her hidden depths.

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