Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/ Ashkenazy, Barbican Hall, London

Playing games with Debussy

We talk a lot about style in music. Like so many things in art, it's easier to identify than to define. The realisation of it is in the phrasing, the articulation, the touch, the feel, the mood. The accent. To hear the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under its Russian conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy was to understand how deeply inbred the natural resistance to an alien style can be. Ashkenazy brought French music – Debussy and Ravel – alongside homespun Czech fare and a few minutes of Debussy's Jeux had me questioning whether this seminal work's near-mythical reputation was not actually fraudulent.

Let me explain. The blend of timbres here is crucial to the colouration. It's like painting: mix the colours wrong and you upset the natural balance. Now the Czech Philharmonic winds are, let's just say, very distinct – which is a pleasure for the most part but needs very careful handling in music of subtler sensibility. It's not uncommon to hear performances of Debussy dogged by what one might call "impressionistic vagueness". In other words, bloodless, vapid. Here, though, was the other extreme; textures so present and distinct (to say nothing of imprecise) that every brush stroke was actually audible. Debussy's "games", for anyone unfamiliar with the ballet, are of a sexual nature, facilitated by the loss of a ball (how very singular, I hear you say) in a tennis match. This Jeux was clearly the masculine perspective. Deuce.

I'm a great fan of this orchestra – any orchestra that holds fast to its personality – but this was not one of its better showings. Even on home turf they floundered. Bohuslav Martinu's extraordinary triptych Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca hung on to conviction in the absence of real accomplishment. It's a piece fraught with multi-divided solo lines, fractured rhythms, textures like shifting sands. It's music in a constant state of flux. But it must feel secure – and it didn't. Even so, something close to a sharp intake of breath was achieved with Martinu's characteristically unpredictable modulations and there was real joy in the emergence of glowing chorales from so much harmonic confusion.

Joy, alas, was conspicuous by its absence from Elisabeth Batiashvili's reading of the Dvorak Violin Concerto. I was much taken by this young Georgian player's highly accomplished and searching account of the Beethoven Concerto at the Proms a couple of years back. She showed much promise. But here, in music of a coarser cut and earthier nature, she seemed uncomfortable, reluctant to enjoy herself and resistant to charm. Her projection was overwrought, the fire in her bow strenuous to the point of recklessness. In repose (Dvorak's rapt slow movement), there was beauty, but no love. Even the orchestra seemed edgy: solo flute and clarinet had little to play off, unforced errors such as an uncharacteristically early horn entry (which was swiftly "sorted" by Ashkenazy) were symptomatic of the mood. Only once in the finale's fleet-footed furiant did the music smile: a couple of bars of bucolic banter from the woodwinds – just to remind us that we were, indeed, in the right hall on the right night.