The baton has already passed. Sir Colin Davis is president now of the London Symphony Orchestra, rather than its principal conductor. Not that anything has changed overnight; though the strings’ honeyed yearnings in Elgar’s Enigma Variations seemed exactly the plush kind of sound the new broom, Valery Gergiev, would probably sweep away. The Russian whirlwind does passion all right; but not Edwardian upholstery.

Upholstery is no problem for Davis, of course. On Saturday he delivered a loving, very well-balanced performance: mellow and tender when Nimrod was being mused over, or the several women in Elgar’s life; brilliant and bumptious when the dog Dan tumbled into the Wye, or Squire Baker barked at his guests. In either register there were so many sounds we could recline in, not least Paul Silverthorne’s solo viola. Elgar’s world, his family, friends and private aches, trembled magnificently before us, vivid and poignant. Gergiev doesn’t know what he’s missing.

We needed this Elgar. For the concert’s first half, all Mozart, had been unusually slow to take fire. The notes weren’t blaringly wrong in the Haffner symphony, No 35; but you certainly felt the orchestra’s weight of numbers. The opening allegro con spirito needed more spirito. Grace emerged for the andante, and the trio tucked up in the third movement was sweet. Still, we couldn’t shake off the feeling of a conductor and orchestra tooling along on polish alone.

A wisp of the mundane persisted into the first movement of the night’s piano concerto, the grand and decorative No 22. The soloist, Emanuel Ax, must shoulder some blame here. No one runs to this elegant artist for flashy hoopla; but the allegro found him so subdued as to leave the phrases scarcely inflected, except by the force of his left-hand bass notes.

In the andante, happily, everything changed, and it stayed changed. Immediately Ax was feeling inside the music; and the rondo finale was a winking delight. The orchestra, too, had turned the corner, with the prominent woodwinds nimble and warmly characterised, and Davis exhorting his players with a light, take-your-partner sway. With Gergiev in charge the dance will be very different.

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