The problem with teenage virtuosos is that they don't always mature in ways one had hoped. Violinist Julian Rachlin became a star at 14, when he won the Eurovision Young Musician of the Year Award. He's now 29, and much of the spontaneity of his earlier playing, it seems, has been replaced by a mannered self-consciousness.

His performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt was a wayward effort. Deploying a lighter tone than many interpreters, Rachlin's approach was meditative and rhapsodic, ill suited to a work that demands grandness of gesture and a sense of the vast span of the its architecture. Rachlin's fondness for dawdling over unaccompanied, or sparsely accompanied, passages led to some swerving variations in speed that threatened to pull the first movement out of shape. The curling phrases of the larghetto hovered between decorative refinement and self-indulgence and it was only in the finale, where rhythmic propulsion gives little room for manoeuvre, that his performance acquired coherence and momentum.

After the interval came Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, not an obvious choice for Blomstedt, though it found him at his best, probing the work's depths without losing sight of its emotional force. Much has been made of the symphony's psychodramatic content, though Blomstedt reminded us that its power also comes from Tchaikovsky's deployment of phrases that germinate and decay, and stretches in which rhythm and counterpoint come close to dislocation. Some might prefer a more vibrant sound, but this performance showed Tchaikovsky to be Brahms's equal in structural complexity, and as such was revelatory.