It's a sign of how much the early-music movement has transformed the establishment that John Eliot Gardiner, once a famous musical iconoclast, now finds himself conducting Walton with the London Symphony Orchestra. This was a concert that celebrated the composer's greatest hits, beginning with Crown Imperial and ending with Belshazzar's Feast.

Even in the hackneyed monarchist pomp of Crown Imperial, Gardiner found a way of illuminating Walton's splendiferous orchestration. He brought a clarity to the main theme that made the music sound bracing and incisive: a vision of a pared-down patriotism.

With the London Symphony Chorus on exuberant form, Belshazzar's Feast was an orgy of noisy, pagan abandon. Baritone Christopher Maltman created a real dramatic frisson in his solos, and in his dual roles of imposing narrator and licentious King Belshazzar. Gardiner roused the chorus to gleeful vulgarity in the work's depiction of Babylon's wildest indulgences as they celebrated the wine, women and flamboyance of Belshazzar's court. But he also managed to make Walton's luxurious orchestration, with its overabundance of saxophone, piano and two extra brass bands, sound piquant, even modernist.

Between these two display pieces was Paul Silverthorne's performance of one of Walton's most intimate orchestral pieces, the Viola Concerto. He relished the melancholy of the soaring solo lines in the first and last movements, and created an acerbic energy in the Scherzo. For all its immediacy, there was nothing sentimental in his playing, and the final moments of the piece, as Silverthorne played a denuded version of the opening movement's theme over a bleak orchestral landscape, were achingly nostalgic.