Elgar's Violin Concerto has often been associated with teenage prodigies. It put the young Yehudi Menuhin on the musical map, and now it has effectively done the same for German wunderkind Julia Fischer.

Unlike Menuhin, who was always modest, Fischer already has the bearing of one who believes herself a star, sweeping on to the platform with considerable hauteur and extending her hand with graceful condescension to the London Philharmonic's leader. After the Concerto, she indulged us with an encore in the form of Bach's D minor Sarabande. Later on, there was a signing session of her debut album in the foyer.

Some of this was a bit OTT, but she played the Elgar phenomenally. The tone is gloriously rich, and she has an innate, deeply serious sense of drama that carried us through the Concerto's vast emotional arc with mesmerising intensity. The conductor was Osmo Vanska, formerly chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, though now, sadly, a rare visitor to these shores. Elgar often profits from non-British interpreters, and the performance stripped away many of the usual overtones of imperialist grandeur, presenting us with a work anchored in the mainstream European tradition of Brahms and Wagner, and shot through with the emotional wildness of Elgar's contemporary, Richard Strauss.

Rautavaara's Isle of Bliss and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony formed the rest of the programme. Rautavaara's bittersweet tone poem, depicting an island off the Finnish coast to which birds migrate to die, is heavily influenced by Sibelius. Vanska, despite his obvious commitment, didn't quite convince us of its worth. Shostakovich's Fifth, meanwhile, has been overexposed of late, though Vanska's performance was one of the finest, taking us on a forceful journey from the gaunt opening through a visionary account of the slow movement to a finale at once elating and nerve-racking in its vacuous triumph.