After the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra rather smugly resting on its laurels, the next distinguished visitors to the Albert Hall were the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, whose lineage may be just as distinguished, but whose approach shows no traces at all of complacency. Riccardo Chailly was bringing the orchestra to the proms for the first time as its music director; he's been in Leipzig two years now, and his rapport with this wonderfully characterful group of musicians seems intensely productive.

By Chailly's standards, the programme, a rather subfusc combination of Beethoven and Brahms, was traditional. But he ensured every bar mattered, showing the precious knack of making the most familiar music seem freshly minted. After an account of Beethoven's Coriolan Overture that made no bones about the work's theatrical origins, the soloist in his Violin Concerto was Viviane Hagner, whose serenely musical, unassertive playing was perfectly apt for this least showy, most lyrical of great concertos. Against her seamlessly singing line, the Leipzig players offered a richly variegated commentary - especially the bassoons (outstanding all evening) and the perfectly rounded horns - supported on a bed of string tone that Chailly could taper down to the finest thread.

Brahms's Fourth Symphony was an object lesson in pacing. The first movement opened almost nonchalantly, with a relaxed lilt to the main theme, which was still keeping something in reserve when the coda was reached. But Chailly gradually raised the emotional temperature; there was a blistering account of the scherzo coloured by rasping rustic horns, and a final passacaglia in which the tension never dropped for a moment. The encore was Brahms as well - a bracing, ebullient account of the Academic Festival Overture, perfectly judged.

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