After his meteoric rise to fame, young British conductor Daniel Harding has made his career in mainland Europe. His concert at the Barbican, with his own Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, was a rare chance to hear him on the concert platform in this country, in music from Mozart to Stravinsky.

Harding's energy on the podium is relentless, and his extreme physical gestures produce explosive playing from the Bremen orchestra. There was no doubting the technical excellence of the string section in Stravinsky's Apollon Musagète, or the strength of Harding's conviction.

Yet the intensity of his approach was precisely the problem with his interpretation. Stravinsky's piece is a hymn to Apollonian grace, but Harding tried to reveal the passion behind the music's neo-classical facades, especially in the final pas de deux. But the price for this insight was an acerbic sound that stripped the music of its essential elegance: it was as if he were trying too hard to prove a musical point.

There was a similar dogmatism in his performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Harding has learned his lessons from period-instrument practice in this repertoire, and he produced a lean but powerful sound from his players.

His uncompromising aggression gave the opening movement an overpowering punch and the finale a triumphalist swagger. However, he had the same approach to the inner movements, and the result was a lack of musical and dramatic contrast. In restoring the violence of Beethoven's vision, he diminished the work's symphonic argument. The opening of the finale did not clinch a musical journey; instead, it amplified the militaristic gestures of the previous movements. By the coda of the piece, there was an unsettling sense of emptiness, making Beethoven's music sound more like a Pyrrhic victory than a triumph of human will over adversity.

Yet Harding proved a sensitive and subtle accompanist for Leif Ove Andsnes in a compelling performance of Mozart's B flat major Piano Concerto, K456. The strength of their partnership was obvious even from the orchestral introduction, as Andsnes supported the orchestra by joining in with bass lines and fanfares. The whole performance was a collaboration of musical minds, rather than a competition for the limelight, as details of phrasing and ornamentation were passed between the soloist and the orchestra.

If the first movement inhabited the glittering world of The Magic Flute, the second movement belonged to the demonic realms of Don Giovanni, as Andsnes was caught in a blaze of orchestral sound: a musical captivity from which he was released by the uninhibited energy of the finale.