Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Jansons, Barbican Hall, London<br></br>Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Harding, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

I've got a little stick and I know how to use it

When two or more orchestral musicians are gathered together, the conversation will invariably swing around to unpopular maestros. "X can't conduct his way out of a paper bag!" goes one of the few printable epithets; an interesting insult which not only – but not always – implies lack of technique on the part of the conductor but also implies their complete unawareness of the orchestral experience. The best conductors, it tells us, have more than the ability to wave a small white stick to indicate speed, volume and tone; they notice the musicians in front of them.

Most conductors learn this over years of trial and error. A few are seemingly born with it. Of these, Mariss Jansons is perhaps the finest example.

As last week's Barbican concert demonstrated, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has changed radically since Jansons succeeded Lorin Maazel as their Music Director and returned to the dark, core sound of the PSO's splendid woodwind section and the rich sonority of their cellos; encouraging the upper strings to listen and adjust their sound accordingly. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta showed just how well this has worked. Starting with a vibrato-free pianissimo that shivered imperceptibly across minute dynamic variants, Jansons established a frigid landscape where both folk and formal, neo-classical elements could speak with complete clarity.

If Jansons's reading of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony seemed oddly low on sarcasm or strangely uncritical to British ears, it seems cheeky to complain. As a Latvian, Jansons doubtless has plenty to say about Stalin – the subject of the work – but as a musician he backgrounded politics and forensic psychology, leaving the listeners to come to their own conclusions over the composer's complicated relationship with Uncle Joe. Though the Barbican's enhanced acoustics made parts of the symphony painfully bright, this was an unusually subtle performance of an unsubtle work, graced with superlative playing from Pittsburgh's oboes and clarinets.

So has Mariss Jansons ever seen the inside of a paper bag? I doubt it. But what of Sir Simon Rattle's dinky protégé, Daniel Harding? Judging from his bizarrely effortful performance of Haydn's Passiontide meditations Die sieben letzen Worte unseren Erlösers am Kreuze with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Harding's is the Christo installation of conductorial paper bags; a wrapping so comprehensive, luxurious and spacious that the conductor inside it has yet to notice its presence let alone break free of it.

It's a curious phenomenon that while orchestras are frequently berated for not paying attention to conductors, conductors get off scott free for ignoring their orchestras. Certainly the orchestra that Harding's laboured, Wagnerian gestures were appropriate to was not the 45-strong OAE. Though the combination of late-Romantic tempi and the slender, misty tone of the natural horns made for an eerie – and risky – opening to Symphony no 49, La Passione, Harding's ideas rarely extended beyond the serial establishment of static sonorities and tempi. With the exception of some well-rehearsed imitative figures in the Presto and a brief flicker of bass-line in the first Introduzione, his Haydn was so melodically driven as to extinguish the counterpoint; making all but the second Introduzione utterly shapeless. Alas, Harding's disinterest in dialogue extended to the text of the Seven Last Words, where, excepting the staccato declamation of "Spott, Verlassung, Angst und Pein", the pristine tones of Clare College Choir were spread like royal icing. Of the four vocal soloists only Julian Podger and Wilke te Brummelstroete survived the leaden speeds with dignity, while Joanne Lunn – so persuasive in baroque repertoire – strained to match the legato demands of the soprano solos.

With a different soprano, a large choral society and a full symphony orchestra, Harding's Haydn might just have worked. With a different conductor, the OAE's Haydn might also have worked. But the membrane between this conductor and this orchestra remained entirely intact and I wondered what on earth either party had gained from working with the other. Has a stint with the OAE become required course work for the up-and-coming maestro? Or is it just a low-risk way of rehearsing repertoire for later events with bigger bands? Keep your eye on the international schedules. You'll soon figure it out.

a.picard@independent.co.uk