Later in the season Christoph Eschenbach is conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra on a tour of China. Good choice, in one way: the country that gave us the Great Wall of China and the controversial Three Gorges Dam should appreciate a good engineer. For that’s what he is so often is, presenting performances that proceed like machines, precise and rigorous, but with as much heart as bathroom scales.

That clarity and low temperature can make him a godsend in contemporary scores. But Bruckner? No one hearing the Sixth Symphony could ever have thought themselves climbing Alps or exploring a cathedral — the usual metaphors for the composer’s idiosyncratic art. Myself, I felt I was shopping in a supermarket, blinking under the fiercely bright light of the LPO’s tone, walking numbed down Eschenbach’s aisles of neatly stacked tins. Where was awe? Or organic growth? This, too, in Bruckner’s most structurally cogent symphony.

The Festival Hall acoustic, clinical despite its last refurbishment, played a part in sapping Bruckner’s spirit. But Eschenbach’s screwdrivers and levers accomplished more, squeezing out warmth and cumulative excitement, flattening the finale’s grand peak. I’ll at least remember this performance fondly for the striding exultation of the first movement’s theme, and the adagio’s gently tapered end. But the visionary heights that first blaze promised never arrived.

Luckily, the LPO turned off the supermarket lights for their part in the orchestrated versions of Wagner’s Wesendonk-Lieder. And Eschenbach seemed a different creature, conjuring up tenderness and refined beauty of tone from musicians clearly as bewitched as himself by the score’s echoes of Tristan und Isolde, composed during the same period. The Tannhäuser overture, too, had appealing and thoughtful moments.

But frustration in this concert was never far away. After the lieder, audiences gave the mezzo-soprano Petra Lang rousing applause: deserved, certainly, for her distinctive appearance and radiant smile, though not perhaps for every inch of her actual performance. Too many lines refused to float, still less fly; a hint of sourness compromised her tone; numerous consonants were spat out too sharply. Lang knows Wagner’s terrain by heart; it’s her regular world. But last Wednesday night she wasn’t at her most persuasive.

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