This was essentially an evening of sweeping musical gestures and rather grand statements. Swiss-born Charles Dutoit tends to adopt an expansive approach towards much that he conducts, with results that sometimes divide opinion. In this instance, he nearly divided the concert in two.

In Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman and Sibelius's Violin Concerto, Dutoit's methods proved powerfully effective. Wagner's overture, which can turn episodic in lesser hands, had an implacable coherence and a terrifying majesty throughout.

Sibelius's Concerto, similarly, was done on the grandest of scales. The soloist was Vadim Repin, whose approach accords with Dutoit's in its mixture of epic and intimate. Some interpreters break down the violin's utterances into cell-like figurations. Repin, in contrast, thinks in terms of vast musical paragraphs, gradually teasing out the emotional trajectory of each statement as it runs its course. As a whole, the performance had a seamless integrity, as if Repin, Dutoit and the Philharmonia were functioning as an indivisible unit. There was none of the usual wayward speeds and pregnant pauses to allow the soloist to show off: Repin integrated even the most virtuosic passages into the work's structure so that every note had meaning and sense.

After the interval, however, Dutoit turned to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which proved altogether more elusive. Dutoit's need to impose unity of purpose and homogeneity of mood sat uneasily with a work that partly depends on stylistic contrasts and emotional jolts for its impact. The Elegy had moments of stolidity when it should have been harrowing. The notorious parody of the invasion theme from Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony - Bartok considered it an inadequate representation of the Nazi threat to Europe - sounded playful rather than barbed. After the Sibelius - one of the finest performances of the concerto to be heard for some time - it was all rather disappointing.