Picture a child prodigy violinist, and you'll probably think of a little automaton making the same soulless, assembly-line sound as the next one. But that's unlikely ever to have been true of Midori, who could have been described as a prodigy for nearly half her 20-year career and is now a veteran in her early thirties.

There's plenty of soul in her playing, and, what's more, she's managed to hold on to a distinctive style. The catch is that sometimes these two aspects of her playing are in conflict with each other.

Her most immediately obvious trademark is the way she launches herself into fierier passages with a no-holds-barred gusto. It can be compelling; but when it verges on ferocity it can interfere with the sound she's making, causing crunching noises at the beginning of notes and preventing the music from soaring in the manner she so clearly wants it to. And, when real aggression is called for, there's nothing left in her armoury to surprise us with.

It's a shame to have her eloquence so restricted - her interpretations are always thoughtful, her pacing is sure and sensitive, and she has a good rapport with her pianist, Robert McDonald.

Still, there were moments in this recital when her playing really took flight, most of them concentrated in the violin sonata by Richard Strauss that formed the climax of the programme. It's an early piece, and a revealing one; in the bravura display of the third movement especially, you can sense the composer of all those huge orchestral tone poems struggling to get out.

The lead-up to the return of the big melody in the first movement was striking; Midori began the phrase darkly and softly and, with absolute control, her sound slowly blossomed as it rose further up the violin.

The sweetness at the very opening of the Strauss probably owed something to the poised grace she and McDonald had just brought to Mozart's Sonata K301 immediately beforehand. This kind of lightness hadn't been on show in the first half of the recital, which began with a purposeful, intermittently harsh account of Dvorak's Op. 100 Sonatina and continued with the discovery of the recital, the Sonata No. 2 by the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, a communist who died in a Nazi concentration camp.

In some ways his writing prefigures the chamber music of Shostakovich, but the music's expansive sweep and irresistible, forceful dynamism are all Schulhoff's own.