There were TV monitors strewn around the foyer for the London Symphony Orchestra's concert with Antonio Pappano on Wednesday - but not, as some of us hoped, to keep the audience up to date with events at the Nou Camp stadium in Barcelona.

This was part of an initiative to provide a permanent installation for closed-circuit relays that can easily be enhanced for live broadcasts. The concert was shown in the foyer, and replayed on a big screen on the piazza outside afterwards. From the point of view of the audience in the hall, it was a welcome change from the usual mob-handed approach to televised concerts: here there were three remote-controlled cameras and just one unobtrusive cameraman on the platform.

Pappano was making his debut with the orchestra. His current post as music director at La Monnaie in Brussels, and his recent appointment to Covent Garden from 2002, has tended to concentrate attention on his achievements in the opera house, but he has a parallel career in the concert hall too. He is principal guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic and, as this programme showed, he is capable of producing music of polish and high tension. Sometimes it is a bit too brittle - there is not a lot of angst - and his approach is rather theatrical: his podium gestures might have been designed to attract the at tention of recalcitrant singers far away upstage in a large house.

Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces positively seethed with latent drama, and sounded more than ever like the kit from which Berg drew all the components of Wozzeck; and the accompaniments to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, in which Andrew Marriner was a suave soloist, were laced with the tragi-comic inflections of a great opera buffa.

There is not much that is operatic about Brahms's First Symphony, yet Pappano's control of that edifice was hugely impressive. He loves rich sonorities, and mapped out the great introduction in bold paragraphs and steered the central pair of movements with gentle firmness.

Though the finale began most powerfully, the tragic dimension was sometimes underplayed, but when C minor finally yielded to C major, Pappano's course was unswerving, and the last few pages left no room for doubts.