John Eliot Gardiner now seems to be a regular guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, bringing some of the ideas he has developed through all those years of working with period instruments to his performances with this unabashedly 21st-century band. Schubert dominated this particular concert, with the overture to Die Zauberharfe to begin and the Ninth Symphony to end.

The overture is better known now as part of the music to Rosamunde, for Schubert recycled it after his Zauberharfe opera bombed, and it was clear from the first few moments of this performance that as well as encouraging the timpani player to use his hard sticks, Gardiner had given the LSO strings a lecture during rehearsals on the sparing use of vibrato.

He hadn't forgotten the music's charm and sheer melodic zest either, nor its theatrical origins, while the minatory trombone contribution to the minor-key introduction linked nicely to Schubert's equally striking use of the instruments in the Ninth Symphony six years later.

Gardiner's view of the symphony was equally dynamic, with tempi generally on the fast side; the second movement Andante was really con moto, as Schubert's marking demands, and there too the careful monitoring of vibrato really paid dividends. The woodwind playing, though, wasn't as scrupulous; by LSO standards it was ordinary, so that the symphony as a whole was stronger on drive and determination than affection and expression.

The orchestral accompaniment to Bartok's Third Piano Concerto wasn't as characterful as it might be either, but as the soloist was Piotr Anderszewski all the attention was on his wonderfully alive and precise playing. Not even his keyboard imagination could do much with the shortcomings of the first movement, but he brought real intensity to the hymn-like refrains and nocturnal rustlings of the slow movement, and a fierce energy to the finale, with its grimly determined exuberance.