The final moments of cellist Peter Wispelwey's performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund, provided a shattering climax. After a last vision of lyricism and warmth, the music plunged into the depths of despair, returning to the desperate, minor-key chords of the opening of the piece.

This passage was made all the more moving thanks to the intensity of Wispelwey's playing of the rest of the concerto. Instead of a world-weary melancholy, his performance was full of energy and insight. He gave the scherzo a flamboyant, fizzing fantasy, a dazzling display of technique that dissipated in the song of the slow movement. But it was the outer movements that were most revelatory: the first, with its endless, circling melody, was not simply a wallowing in musical nostalgia, but a vivid, heart-rending lament, and the fast music of the finale was a frantic railing against the dying of the light. Instead of sounding like Elgar's musical farewell, the concerto seemed, in Wispelwey's hands, brilliantly original: a piece of shocking concision and power.

Berglund and the LPO were sensitive and supple accompanists, but the conductor cuts a frail figure these days. Now in his mid-70s, he makes a faltering passage to the podium, and yet the energy and focus of his performance of Sibelius's Second Symphony belied this diminishing of his physical powers. In fact, this was an interpretation of searing excitement and, in the final movement, overpowering force. Yet for all the intensity of the big tune in the finale, in which Berglund revelled in the full power of the LPO's brass section, the slow second movement was the heart of this performance. Berglund made this movement a miniature symphonic poem, from the opening tread of the double basses to its unpredictable, eruptive climaxes, revealing the colour and fantasy of Sibelius's imagination.