Any review of a concert in St Paul's Cathedral is a tale of a battle between a performance and the acoustic. One wishes it was otherwise, but discussion is inevitably dominated by the cathedral's 13-second reverberation, the musicians' ability to counter it and the suitability of particular works for the space. Music in which intricacy of detail is important is particularly likely to come unstuck.

The latest casualty in this regard was the London Symphony Orchestra's performance of Beethoven's Ninth conducted by Myung-Whun Chung as part of this year's City of London festival. Chung's interpretation – grand in manner and articulation, and constraining Dionysian elation within careful consideration of form – is admirably suited to the symphony. We just didn't hear enough of it for it to have its full impact.

Melody, one notices, more easily survives the reverberation than thematic repetition, which means that the Adagio expanded majestically into the space, while the textures of the scherzo clotted later than one anticipated. The outer movements were detrimentally affected.

The sectional dialogues of the first movement development blurred into an aural slosh that precluded any sense of logic, rhetoric or drama. The cello-bass recitatives that dominate the opening of the finale threatened to turn into duets in canon with their own echoes. The final acceleration into frenzy was exhilarating through the sheer decibel-count alone, but could have been so much more exciting had we heard the notes.

There were occasional pluses – strong playing from the LSO, sumptuous singing from the London Symphony Chorus, and a fine quartet of Korean soloists led by the excellent Kathleen Kim, whose voice cut through the aural fog around her like a laser. But too much of it went for nothing, and the decision to perform the work in this venue was unwise.