When postwar French music was dominated by the hegemony of Messiaen and Boulez, a distinctive but less radical creative voice like Henri Dutilleux's tended to be disregarded. But with Messiaen gone and the old orthodoxies crumbled away, Dutilleux's elegantly crafted and subtly coloured music has come into its own. Now 84, he has been the London Philharmonic's "composer in focus" this season, and he was in the audience at the Festival Hall on Wednesday when Kent Nagano and the orchestra, with the cellist Lynn Harrell, played one of his best known and most impressive scores, Tout un monde lointain, written in 1970 for Rostropovich.

The title comes from Baudelaire, and each of the five continuous movements carries an epigraph from the poet as well. It is music of suggestion rather than explicit programmatic content, in which the cello sings a series of enigmatic songs, some of them passionate, some of them introspective, while the orchestra adds its own commentary. The colouring and the voicing of the music is always unmistakably French - Dutilleux's fastidious orchestration has a Ravelian sureness about it - and it is bound together with thematic and harmonic threads that run almost unheard through all the movements.

Harrell delivered the solo part with great command, and obvious relish; he made the considerable technical challenges look almost negligible. And Nagano is an expert in marshalling the forces in a score like this, applying all the colours in the right proportion, bringing perspective to the textures, getting the rhythmic patterning exactly right.

Nagano began with the third of Beethoven's Leonora Overtures, using an over-sized orchestra (10 cellos) yet producing a performance that on its own slightly raucous terms was highly effective. He ended with Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, in a performance that unfolded perfectly naturally and in which he was constantly on the lookout for a dark undertow to the balletic surfaces of the music, sometimes managing to find one.