Although Esa-Pekka Salonen is still best known as a conductor, his reputation as a composer is growing. His short overture Gambit gleams with the confidence of an assured professional. Opening quietly in quasi-minimalist style, it expands in a dramatic wedge shape towards a powerful, percussive climax. While retaining the minimalist's active pulsation, Gambit is far more harmonically directed than is conventional for classic minimalism, and in the early stages of the piece, there is a distinctly Sibelian tinge to the wind colours and harmonies. Its steady build towards climax has a sense of luxuriating in its own sonority that lights it up from within. The whole work was beautifully shaped and balanced by the Hallé and its young guest conductor, Baldur Brönniman.

Now 16, Chloe Hanslip began learning the violin at two and made her Purcell Room debut at four. Not surprisingly, perhaps, what she has in terms of technique - a lovely, warm sound and an effervescent brilliance - is not yet matched by musical maturity. And in some ways that's not a bad thing: if you have peaked at 16, it hardly bodes well for the rest of your career. The Bruch concerto is such a rhapsodic work, however, that the last thing it needs is to be milked to death: phrases were dragged out and lingered over mercilessly, at times forcing the orchestra to wait in a way that felt artificial rather than moving. Even Brönniman and the Hallé did not distinguish themselves here, with a startlingly clumsy climax in the first movement.

After the first three movements of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, it seemed as though Brönniman agreed with the composer's own distaste for the work. Playing it absolutely straight, as Brönniman did here, merely makes it sound ordinary. But the finale, which usually fares worst in an average performance, was absolutely convincing. There's no escaping its bombastic tone, but by letting its powerful inner drive control its pacing, Brönniman allowed it to speak for itself, proving that it isn't necessary to try to make this finale strange: it does that quite magnificently by itself.