Chopin's F minor Piano Concerto is a cornerstone of the pianist's repertoire and, in its way, one of his earliest masterpieces. Yet the orchestral writing is acknowledged to be weak by comparison with that of the brilliant keyboard, so this performance by the European Union Chamber Orchestra (EUCO) with soloist Mikhail Kazakevich was a fascinating exercise.

St George's auditorium is effectively a halfway house between the large orchestral halls Chopin so hated and his preferred intimate Parisian salons.

Evidence suggests that Chopin did play the concertos with string quintet forces and, here, the EUCO's 15-strong string ensemble was a similar compromise. However, with violas obliterated behind the piano and cellos, and bass not giving adequate weight to Chopin's already well-developed harmony, the balance was still unequal.

Kazakevich was engagingly direct, even nonchalant, in the scintillating display passages, but scaling down his dynamics slightly might have created a more poetic exchange with the solo string lines emerging from the transparent texture.

With the exception of Borodin's quirky Scherzo and its mix-and-match trio found by Glazunov, the rest of the EUCO's programme also featured the work of flowering young genius. Directed by violinist Germot Süssmuth, they had opened in lively fashion with Schubert's Overture in C minor, but it was Mozart's Divertimento in F major K138 that found them in sweetest tone, with the central Andante's duet between first and second violins briefly touching remarkable emotional depths.

Britten's A Simple Symphony is a sometimes self-conscious rearrangement of precocious childhood works and, though the EUCO played it with great sincerity, in the end it was the muted, lustrous sheen of their Tchaikovsky encore, Elegie, that hit the Mozart spot again.