The tall, gaunt figure of Frans Brüggen is familiar on London concert platforms conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and his own Orchestra of the 18th Century.

Both are period instrument bands, but last night he appeared at the Festival Hall with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, whose starting point at least is the performance practice of the present day.

But working with this Dutch conductor is no culture shock for the COE; they have after all forged a hugely successful partnership with another great pioneer of historically aware performances, Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Brüggen's approach was equally hybrid - though the strings and woodwind were modern instruments, the trumpets were natural and the small timpani played with hard sticks.

For the first half of the concert too, he had reorganised the orchestral seating, placing a phalanx of woodwind to his right with the bassoons at the front in a selection of Beethoven's dances, and embedding the oboes deep in the string section, alongside a musette, in a suite from Rameau's Nais.

The sequence of short movements, 24 in all, made for a curious start to the concert. Brüggen had made his own sequence of Beethoven's minuets, country dances and German dances and though he made each of them sharply characterful, to follow that with an equally vivid pot pourri from Rameau's pastorale-heroique , left the audience (a shamefully small one) with little to chew on until after the interval.

That the work in the second half was Beethoven's violin concerto, with Viktoria Mullova as the glorious soloist, was a considerable compensation though. The tone of her gut-strung Stradivarius was endlessly sweet, her ability to spin every phrase in a seamless, perfectly etched line unfailing.

As Brüggen brought out all the detail of the scoring in sharp relief, the dialogue between the violinist and the orchestra took on a chamber music intimacy.