London Philharmonic/ Eschenback, Royal Festival Hall, London

Here's what the fuss is all about

If it was the young Chinese pianist Lang Lang whose performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto drew a large crowd to the Royal Festival Hall, then at least a lot of people also got to hear Kaija Saariaho's Nymphea Reflection, being given its British premiere. This was the last in a commendable series of three works by the Finnish composer to be mounted by the London Philharmonic Orchestra this season, while Saariaho has been the LPO's Composer in Focus. The valuable scheme continues next season with Julian Anderson.

Unlike the other two pieces, this offering was more of a throwback to her 1980s style. Though a considerably revised version of Nymphea (written in 1987 for the Kronos Quartet), its successor (premiered in Germany last summer) retains much of the earlier work's investigation of the innards of sound.

Nymphea did this with the help of live electronics. Nymphea Reflection relies solely on a string orchestra, extending the original work by dividing its now 25-minute span (at least in this performance) into six largely separate movements. The resulting structure alternates slowly shifting sonorities – at times ethereally beautiful, at others darkly swelling and dying – with fast music of a sometimes too Penderecki-like nature. At the end, the performers whisper a poem by Arseny Tarkov-sky; its repeated line, "But there has to be more", is aptly reflected in the incipient lyricism of Saariaho's music. By then, mercifully, the audience's rampant coughing had subsided. Christoph Eschenbach and the LPO strings appeared to do the piece proud.

As for Lang Lang's Tchaikovsky: well, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about. Here is a player with abundant musical as well as technical skills, capable of etching a lyrical line to within a quarter of an inch of being ridiculously overdone, and driving forward the more dramatic passages with stunning dynamic contrasts and some dizzying tempi.

Yes, there are irritating mannerisms in both stage manner (that clenched left hand while listening intently to the orchestra) and playing (those eccentric accents just after the first movement's cadenza). But you readily forgive these as the excesses of youth, since such innately musical playing and compelling sense of rhythm are rare and precious in such hackneyed repertoire. The ovation produced a Schumann encore, actually not as exquisitely rendered as I'd expected. After all that, even an account of Brahms's First Symphony as strong and sinewy as Eschenbach and the LPO offered in the concert's second half was inevitably something of an anticlimax.

This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 tonight at 7.30pm.