The tall, gaunt figure of Frans Bruggen is familiar on London concert platforms conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and his own Orchestra of the 18th Century. Both are period-instrument bands, but last night he appeared at the Festival Hall with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, whose starting point is the performance practice of the present day.

But working with this Dutch conductor is no culture shock for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; it has, after all, forged a hugely successful partnership with another great pioneer of historically aware performances, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Bruggen's approach was equally hybrid: although the strings and woodwind were modern instruments, the trumpets were natural and the small timpani were played with hard sticks. For the first half of the concert, too, he had reorganised the orchestral seating, placing a phalanx of woodwind to his right with the bassoons at the front for a selection of Beethoven's dances, and embedding the oboes deep in the string section, alongside a musette, for a suite from Rameau's Nais.

The sequence of short movements, 24 in all, made for a curious start to the concert. Bruggen had created his own sequence of Beethoven's minuets, country dances and German dances. Although he made each of them sharply characterful, his decision to follow them with an equally vivid pot-pourri from Rameau's pastorale-heroique left the audience with little to chew on.

The second half was a compensation: Beethoven's Violin Concerto, with Viktoria Mullova as the glorious soloist. The tone of her gut-strung Stradivarius was endlessly sweet, her ability to spin every phrase in a seamless, perfectly etched line unfailing.

As Bruggen brought out all the detail of the scoring in sharp relief, the dialogue between the violinist and the orchestra took on the intimacy of chamber music. There were no raised voices; there did not need to be. Mullova led from the slow movement into the finale via a cadenza that was both pithy and beautifully concise. It was a paradigm of the whole performance, in which nothing was extraneous.

· A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.