Daniel Harding is still a young conductor, and a young view of Bruckner is no bad thing. Too often we hear his gigantic symphonies ossified into an overpolished grandeur that makes him sound like the aural equivalent of the Hapsburg Empire.

No danger of that with the Fourth Symphony here. For a start Harding chose Bruckner’s original conception: more experimental and perhaps messier than the familiar revision. Then he stressed not the long line of these sprawling movements, but their turbulence and episodic nature. Similarly, there was a noticeably rough, unblended feel to many of the fortissimo tuttis, rather than the mellifluously varnished finish supplied by many older conductors.

It’s true that sometimes — notably in the slightly Disneyfied dynamics he applied to the slow movement — Harding seemed to want the music to sound as angst-ridden as Mahler’s. That’s probably a misreading of Bruckner’s obsessive but not anguished personality. Yet overall I found his interpretation compelling.

And the London Symphony Orchestra played well for him — none more so than David Pyatt, the brilliant first horn. He was flawless in a work that is like a long tightrope walk without a safety-net for whoever is brave enough to sit in that chair.

Harding was brought in as the LSO’s principal guest conductor partly to bring a whiff of adventure to the programming, and this concert’s first half exemplified that. First the LSO’s strings plunged diligently into the arcane rhythmic mysteries of Boulez’s Livre pour cordes. Then Sally Matthews uncorked her creamiest tone in the soprano solo of Poèmes pour Mi by Boulez’s teacher, Messiaen.

It’s hard to believe that the exotic, luscious harmonies of the latter — a quintessential Messiaen meshing of erotic and sacred love — could belong in the same universe as his pupil’s almost pathologically dispassionate music, let alone be premiered in the same city in the same decade.

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