"Additional works will be announced from the platform," said the programme, and there was a ripple of audience laughter as Itzhak Perlman and his accompanist Bruno Camino returned to the stage armed with a stack of music six inches high. Perlman's now infrequent recitals are always an event, and it's almost impossible to overstate the amount of goodwill this veteran violinist can generate.

It was partly this goodwill that had sustained him, and us, through a decent but generally uneventful reading of Beethoven's Sonata No 1 in D, with the odd moment of imprecise tuning. However, with Franck's masterly Sonata in A major Perlman raised his game, shaping and pacing his playing artfully, although Camino's sensitive accompaniment needed more fire in the fast movements. Perlman spun out his melodies generously, often using the violin's topmost string, the E, unstopped. It seemed a natural part of his trademark big, butch yet often melting tone. That tone changed in response to the more elusive atmosphere of Debussy's brief Sonata, lightening enough to be ethereal in the first movement and to negotiate unencumbered the cascades of the third.

For all this, there was the ineluctable feeling that these pieces could, nowadays, sound more satisfying in different hands. But then, it's the "additional works" that are always the high spot of Perlman's recitals; grand encore showpieces or brief charmers despatched with well-oiled virtuosity.

Perlman is just one of a long line of stage-animal violin virtuosos, but he is the grandaddy of all those attempting this repertoire today. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, after a brace of Heifetz transcriptions, a spot of Kreisler and a seamless account of Tchaikovsky's Chanson Sans Paroles, he opted to sign off with Bazzini's La Ronde Des Lutins, Vengerov's current encore of choice. And perhaps it wasn't our imagination that he played it a touch more wittily and even a notch faster than his pretender.