Teenage prodigies are always ­newsworthy, though also, of course, nothing new. In the salons of ­Berlin in 1823, the name of Felix ­Mendelssohn, then 14, was on ­everyone's lips. He already had a number of compositions to his name, ­including 12 sinfonias for string ­orchestra and a clutch of concertos. Those early works were ­eventually ­classified and even dismissed as ­juvenilia, though they also made ­Mendelssohn a star.

Programming a selection from them alongside music by Schubert, violinist and conductor Giuliano Carmignola and the Academy of Ancient Music allowed us to hear just what the fuss was about. The Ninth and Tenth String Sinfonias are biggish pieces, excitedly experimental at times, and displaying elements of emotional riskiness and openness that the adult Mendelssohn would later carefully avoid. The Ninth, with its fugues and counterpoint, already shows the influence of his beloved Bach. The Tenth, in one movement, has both a Beethovenian tension and a structural expansiveness curiously prophetic of Schubert's Ninth Symphony.

Early works by major ­composers can sometimes provoke a ­sentimental or patronising interpretation. ­Carmignola's sparse, insistent ­conducting and the leanness in the AAM's sound, ­however, brought home the ­underlying ­toughness and integrity of both works. A no-nonsense, big-boned approach similarly informed his playing of ­Mendelssohn's Violin ­Concerto in D minor (composed at 13), and Schubert's A major Rondo, D 438. Written alongside the Fifth ­Symphony when Schubert was 19, the latter is no masterpiece, though ­Carmignola ­dispatched it with superb elan and grace. Mendelssohn's early ­Concerto, ­classical and austere, isn't quite the equal of the accompanying Sinfonias, but was performed with a ­startling rugged strength.