You can't fake a smile as wide as the one Yo-Yo Ma has when he's playing his cello. Even if you could, you wouldn't be able to hold it as long as him. Few performers radiate their enjoyment of music anything like as much as Ma, who appeared here as soloist in two concertos and then turned up again at the back of the cellos to jam through Haydn's Symphony No. 83, beaming that big smile at conductor Ton Koopman and at anyone else who caught his eye.

There were several familiar faces on stage, as there's a considerable overlap between the Amsterdam Baroque and the London period orchestras. Energised, galvanised and sometimes almost subverted by Koopman's harpsichord playing, they brought a sense of freshness to familiar numbers from Handel's Water Music. The symphony, too, flowed with phrasing that was constantly alive.

However, Ma's two concertos - Haydn's D major and Vivaldi's C minor - didn't provide quite the spark we might have expected. Unfailingly musical and yet stubbornly small-toned, his playing offered only fleeting hints of the singing lyricism of which we know him to be capable on a modern instrument; some of the most note-heavy passages of the Haydn were more visibly than audibly virtuosic. You'd expect that in returning his Stradivarius to something approaching its original 18th-century state Ma would have sacrificed some of its power; but not this much - it seemed to have lost not only its spike but its manhood as well.

The Vivaldi brought some marginally warmer-toned playing, but it's a slight piece that doesn't really get going until the finale. Ma's encores were typically plentiful, the highlight being a movement from a Vivaldi double concerto in which he was well matched by Jonathan Manson, the orchestra's lead cellist. Here, rightly, he was playing as part of a team. There are times, though, when Ma might better serve the music he so relishes if he played less like a generous chamber musician and more like a selfish, attention-hungry soloist.