My last encounter with Kurt Masur was not a happy one: March 2001, Avery Fischer Hall, Tchaikovsky’s "Little Russian" Symphony played loud, hard, and fast, as if the conductor’s score had the misprint "Little Prussian." Masur hit Symphony Hall on Sunday with the London Philharmonic, the first of the four orchestras the FleetBoston Celebrity Series will be presenting this season, and the result was respectable if not quite redemptive.

The program, Beethoven’s First Symphony and Bruckner’s Seventh, didn’t send shivers of anticipation up the spine: Ben Zander (Boston Philharmonic) and Bernard Haitink (Boston Symphony) have done the Seventh over the past two years (why do we never get the Fifth or the Sixth?), and after stylish, pared-down Beethoven from Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, do we need a big-band First? Still, Beethoven’s delightful debut symphony isn’t done often enough, and though Masur’s no-score, no-baton podium manner can be distracting (he looks like Professor Rath chewing out the students in Der blaue Engel), this was a mostly idiomatic performance. Separating the first and second violins would have helped (Abbado doesn’t split them either), and I couldn’t be sure everybody was using the new Bärenreiter score (one difference is that the violins have an untied note at bar 33 of the Andante; here the strings were blurry and the phrases weren’t clear). The opening Molto adagio bars were nicely balanced and felt, the canon in the Andante was limpid, and you could hear Ludwig’s anticipation of Die lustige Witwe (or at least Berlioz’s Corsaire Overture) in the "operetta" section of the Finale. When the orchestra got loud, however, it became coarse and unbalanced, and there were no dance rhythms, the result of Masur’s pressing too hard on the beat.

Bruckner’s Seventh suffered from the same problems. Both beginning and end of the first movement were mesmerizingly slow and beautiful, but in between the three subjects were insufficiently distinctive in tempo and personality, the brass weren’t noble (a Bruckner sine qua non), the percussion drowned out the climax, and Bruckner’s characteristic questioning of key-signature progressions went for nothing. The Adagio’s aching Moderato second subject emerged in a businesslike one-to-the-bar, and though at the climax Masur did abjure the cymbal clash Bruckner’s "friends" persuaded him to add, he made an obsession of the basic three-note motif, and the first violins kept accelerating the phrase ends of their Wagner threnody. It all held together better than Haitink’s performance this past January, and there were even some breathtaking moments, but when I got home I still needed an Eugen Jochum chaser.