At 24, violinist Hilary Hahn is already eight years older than Yehudi Menuhin was when he recorded the Elgar Violin Concerto with the composer himself conducting. Yet, in this performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, everything pointed to Hahn having neither the instinct nor the emotional perspective that the work demands.

She clearly possesses all the technical apparatus, making light of the concerto's difficulty, but she skated too easily over its surface without scoring deeper into the music's dark, troubled heart. Hahn has collaborated before with conductor Hugh Wolff, a fellow American, but there was no obvious rapport between them. Only in the finale, as Elgar allows the soloist to dominate rather more, did Hahn's mercurial playing begin to take flight.

However, the concerto's final resolution was made to seem wanting - partly since the Colston Hall's acoustic couldn't do justice to the strings' unusual pizzicato tremolando effect at the point where the violin cadenza returns to a more contemplative mode. Hahn played her unaccompanied Bach encore with relief, perhaps realising that here, she knew exactly where she stood.

As a New World man, Wolff might also have been expected to feel on surer ground with Dvorak's Ninth Symphony. Not so. His conducting is angular and fussy - was he good at semaphore as an eager young scout? - but the result is imprecise. In particular, his preoccupation with the linear shapes of Dvorak's melodies, which he could have entrusted to the more-than-capable BSO players, was at the expense of the vertical. Chords lacked their harmonic colour and architectural significance.

Walton's zany Façade Suite No 1 had opened the evening, like fizzy cocktails to help deal with what was to follow. Wolff got the measure of the mordant wit and, in retrospect, it helped leaven a slightly ponderous evening.