For one of the violin world's hottest properties, Julia Fischer cuts a surprisingly cool figure on stage. Teamed with conductor Yakov Kreizberg, her vehicle here was Dvorak's Violin Concerto, a romantic showpiece too often passed over in favour of Bruch and Mendelssohn, but with a piquant slow movement to compete with either.

Fischer made sure we heard every note, handing us each bar with absolute technical assurance and in a lustrous, seamless tone. She is an enormously impressive player, and it's hard to imagine what would faze her. Here, that was the problem. Of course a violinist doesn't have to look frenzied in order to sound impassioned, but Fischer would have frozen the pegs off an ice violin, and her impassive stage manner was mirrored in her playing from the start.

She was at her best in the finale, spiced by Dvorak with playful folk rhythms; here she could almost have passed her composure off as deadpan wit. In the second movement she repeated the same descending phrase three times without so much as tweaking its timbre. And in the first movement there were moments where, thanks also to Kreizberg's perfect, upright posture, you knew what it would look like if mannequins ever took over the podium.

Kreizberg's posture may be perfect, but his conducting was far from impassive, and it would be good to hear more of him. Shostakovich's colossal Fourth Symphony emerged in full colour, full of long crescendos and brash but well-prepared climaxes. The ensemble was tight, bar a couple of tricky corners, but speeds were cautious, meaning a couple of passages including the second-movement string fugue got bogged down. This was calculated efficiency British-orchestra-style: a performance that conveyed 95 per cent of the music's potential yet left one wondering what might have been had time or money been found for just one more rehearsal.