For a pianist who is such a controlled, fastidious player, Pierre-Laurent Aimard makes a surprisingly expansive conductor. Actually, that's an understatement: taking the Chamber Orchestra of Europe through Mozart's Symphony No 29, his arms traced intricate, ever-changing patterns as he tried to suggest the shape of every phrase, so that images of octopi in tumble-dryers were sometimes hard to suppress. But it was the musical results that mattered, and those could not be faulted: this was a big-boned, bold performance, bursting with energy and characterful stylishness.

Aimard was really there, however, to play and conduct a pair of Mozart piano concertos. Pianists who do both usually remove the lid from the piano for the performance so that eye contact with the orchestra is not impeded, though the sound suffers as a result. Aimard employed a different solution. The lid had been removed from his Steinway as usual, but it was replaced with a series of transparent, angled "sound mirrors" to project the sound into the auditorium. It looked a bit Heath Robinson, as if a gigantic louvred window had been dropped on to the piano, but it did the job, and Aimard's sound was bright and sharply focused against the orchestra.

He ended at the beginning, with the E flat Concerto K271 - regarded as the first of Mozart's truly characteristic piano concertos - and found extraordinary, searching depths in the C minor slow movement (which anticipates the movement in the same key in the violin-and-viola Sinfonia Concertante). The last movement of the F major Concerto K459 sparkled just as infectiously. Aimard's rapport with the COE, particularly its woodwind section, was remarkable, too, with a chamber-like give and take between the piano's solos and the orchestra's.