Ticciati/Uchida, Barbican, review - Telegraph Mozart and Dvorak, Mitsuko Uchida and the London Symphony Orchestra: this concert bore the unmistakable stamp of Sir Colin Davis. Until his death in April, Davis had indeed been due to conduct it, and his place was taken here by Robin Ticciati. As a curtain-raiser to the scheduled programme, Uchida inserted her own very personal tribute in the form of Mozart's Rondo in A minor, K 511, on the grounds that it had been one of Davis's favourite pieces of music. Playing this solo work with the orchestra already sitting on stage around her, Uchida captured its sorrowful spirit with an almost confessional tone. Her delivery of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K 453, also had all the intimacy this work requires, yet the glowing patina of her tone was not always matched by the LSO. Lacking a hands-on music director interested in rehearsing, the orchestra has developed a sometimes brazen sound, and the louder passages were short on Mozartian elegance. Hardly Ticciati's fault, then, though at the opening he seemed to be working against the music rather than letting it flow through him. Having calmed down, he was at one with Uchida in the humour of the finale, with its Papageno-like music anticipating the bird-catcher in Die Zauberflöte. Bucolic even by Dvorak's standards, his seldom-played Fifth Symphony has been seen as the Bohemian composer's answer to Beethoven's Pastoral, with which it even shares the key of F major. But in Ticciati's hands it didn't always flow organically, and the dances felt rather too lumberingly rustic. The sheer size of the orchestra here, unreconstructed in its number of strings, may have mitigated against the ensemble sounding snappier in the last two movements. In between, we heard the premiere of Matthew Kaner's The Calligrapher's Manuscript, commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composers Scheme. Taking its inspiration from the work of the 17th-century Bavarian master calligrapher Johann Hering, the new piece - scored for large forces and lasting just over 10 minutes - opens with an outburst of tinkling high up in the orchestra and chattering winds, everyone in a state of flux and tracing ornamental lines. Kaner's handling of the orchestra is accomplished from the start, and as the work progresses he stamps an imaginative mark, too: the second half develops quite sensuously as long and sinuous lines emerge from underneath the filigree.