Wang, Lapwood, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - grace and power from two keyboard heroines

It takes stiff competition to outshine Yuja Wang, who last night at the Barbican complemented her spangled silver sheath with a disconcerting pair of shades. But the super-heroine pianist, who played Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, turned out to contribute the (comparatively) restrained and low-key element of a London Symphony Orchestra programme that culminated in a wall-shaking performance of Saint-Saëns’ "Organ" Symphony, with Anna Lapwood at the manuals.

In this, the third of Sir Antonio Pappano’s opening quartet of the LSO season’s concerts, glittering (or thunderous) panache of execution perhaps mattered more than the subtle service of towering masterworks. Even in its 1917 revision, Rach’s First Concerto seldom touches the heights of its successors – though lovers of the mysterious andante may well disagree. In the Saint-Saëns, great stretches of musclebound late-Victorian melodrama – it was premiered in 1886 in London, after all – precede the outrageous C major coup of the earworm organ theme. Perhaps only Pappano’s opener, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival overture, creates a completely satisfying sound-world. What we did enjoy, in lavish abundance, was Pappano’s LSO letting rip in all its bright splendour, and silken warmth, under the baton-less hands of a maestro whose gestures can conjure dazzlingly intense drama and colour at every turn. Not even he could banish all the Organ Symphony’s galumphing bombast – but he certainly made it dance.

The Berlioz allowed us to hear a range of strongly accented, and finely integrated, orchestral colours, first from horn and clarinet before Maxwell Spiers’s cor anglais unspooled its lovely aria. The LSO strings, with Benjamin Gilmore as leader, struck a vein of robust sweetness that balanced Berlioz’s nods to vernacular melody with a skittish, witty charm. Pappano injected a ferocious drive into the galloping fugue; this carnival, pushed along at a spanking pace, rightly felt as if it teetered on the edge of mayhem.

Yuja Wang receives such regular, and routine, praise for her spectacular virtuosity that it becomes too easy to overlook the delicate art behind the acrobatics. In the Rachmaninov, we heard all the velocity and vivacity you might expect, but also a nerveless precision that somehow made space, and time, amid the most frenzied passages. Wang’s ability to join torrential athleticism with fearsome exactitude still astonishes, even if the pulse and drive of the LSO sound threatened at moments to eclipse even a soloist as stellar as this one. There’s an infectious joyfulness in Wang’s playing that keeps any sense of oxygen-hogging exhibitionism at bay. At the same time, her crisp articulation, even at super-fast speeds, illuminates each harmonic and melodic strand as it weaves across both flying hands.

The soulfully gliding LSO strings – all deep velvet and rich cream – claimed their own spells in the sun. In the andante, Wang found a strain of meditative, time-suspending grace, enhanced by rubato flickers that added a rhythmic frisson to this otherworldly serenade. After this spun-silk reverie, the finale saw her in both mercurial and magisterial moods, debonair rather than strenuously gymnastic. Pappano kept the mood brisk and airy, never ponderous, with honey rather than syrup sweetening the soaring lyricism. If Wang sometimes lowered the temperature and lightened the tone of the concerto, in the "Organ" Symphony Pappano if anything loaded extra flavour into an already calorific – even potentially cloying – feast. You can’t really hunt for too much finesse in this work, although he burnished the saturated string and woodwind colours of the adagio. When it came to relentless crescendos and open-throttled tutti, though, the LSO supplied the full, blazing heavy-metal experience. That didn’t rule out tender and polished individual flourishes, from the doomy trombones, wistful oboes or richly expressive bassoons. At her modest ad hoc console beside the basses, Anna Lapwood (pictured above with Antonio Pappano) slightly struggled to make her initial contributions, within the Adagio, cut through the raucous surrounds.

No such worries for her big theme in the final allegro, executed with charismatic dash, although the Barbican acoustic did not really serve the Saint-Saëns sonic theatre particularly well. Still, we could appreciate Elizabeth Burley’s flamboyant piano part, almost as eccentrically memorable as the organ turn itself. Pappano’s hard-driving accelerando pushed us over the line in a piece that, for all its extravagant follies, never ceases to be fun. The LSO let their hair down, and so kept our spirits riotously up.

• Last of Pappano's four September concerts with the LSO is on Thursday 19 September
• More classical reviews on theartsdesk