For the latter,Haitink will have been comforting.A master of subtle pacing and balance, and expressive power without extreme force, Haitink was at his best handling the romantic ebb and flow of Symphony No 1 in the second of his two programmes. Polished playing and finely judged phrasing made everything fall into place: the portentous introduction, the regaining of momentum after major turned back to minor, the sudden speedings and mysterious interventions at the start of the finale, all beautifully presented in themselves, were at the same time part of a bigger picture whose dimensions were always clear.The earlier concert had been a less happy experience. A plodding Tragic Overture, and the heavier moments of Symphony No 2, recalled the old attitude to articulating Brahms’s orchestral music that gave it all the flair of a reluctant shire horse. Fully scored passages became bogged down, and no amount of effort could speed them along.The good things here, and in No 1, were the serenade-like moments when Brahms let the music flow freely.

Best of all was a rare performance of the Serenade No 2, in which massed and solo woodwinds dominate the score and make the music sing out like Schubert. With a half-sized orchestra Haitink chose to be light and fleet, and without losing energy the music took on the intimacy of a chamber ensemble. The symphonies were recorded for the orch-estra’s LSO Live label; luckily, the Serenade was too.The other big success was Brahms’s Double Concerto. In the tradition of giving section principals a night in the spotlight, it featured the LSO’s leader Gordan Nikolitch and the principal cellist Tim Hugh, who rose to the occasion with vital intensity to deliver the gypsy-style solos that crop up throughout the concerto, and to find a light, rhythmic ease for the finale’s rather square-cut tune that the stars who sometimes play this work would do well to match..

A group-therapy session seems, on the face of it, to be one of the last places one might associate with the making of a musical comedy. Conor Mitchell’s Have a Nice Life, however, sets its dramatic focus around just such a session in Northern Ireland. Having already composed pieces for the National Youth Music Theatre, Mitchell took to the task with brio, and finished the first draft after only two weeks. “I wanted to do a musical because it’s fun, and it hadn’t been done in Northern Ireland Then, I had to find an excuse for people to burst into song.

I decided that in order to make the scenes work, the characters would either have to be in therapy or at a s?ce, so I opted for therapy. And, because I wrote it so quickly, the melodies are considerably more hummable than if I’d spent months on it. It would have got too complex.”Set in a black box theatre, with a six-piece orchestra, Have a Nice Life turns on a single therapy session at which only six people of the 20 expected have turned up. Told they must open up, the group find common ground in the fact that they have all been abandoned in the past – the title is taken from their joint attempts to reconcile themselves to those who have left them.