I've been living with Neville Marriner and the orchestra he formed in 1958, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, for most of my life. So prolific, in fact, has this partnership been in its recording projects – which, though it has concentrated on baroque and classical repertoire, embrace music of the 19th and 20th centuries – that many listeners will have had the same experience: Marriner and his band's uniquely balanced and polished sound have become an indelible part of classical music's heartlands.

Indeed, the truly extraordinary thing about this concert, held in celebration of the conductor's 90th birthday later this month, wasn't the fact that Marriner is still capable at this advanced age of leading the orchestra with his habitual good-humoured perfectionism. Rather, it's that the sound produced seems completely unchanged: close your eyes and it's like being suspended in a gilded time warp.

This continuity was reflected most of all in Mozart's D minor Concerto, with the Academy's principal guest conductor, Murray Perahia, joining Marriner as a soloist whose supremely elegant phrasing and focused tone was effortlessly in tune with the orchestra's own style. Perahia was preceded as soloist by Joshua Bell in Saint-Saëns Op 28 Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, for which Bell directed the orchestral accompaniment while spinning the solo part's filigree webs with his customary grace and charm.

The orchestra swelled a little in size for Elgar's Enigma Variations, which Marriner conducted, perhaps a little uncertainly at first, but with growing stature and feeling. The climactic conclusion was followed by a rapturous ovation from the capacity audience, and then by an apposite lyrical outpouring in the form of the slow movement of Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, Grainger's lusciously arranged strains of Londonderry Air, and, finally, Happy Birthday.

• Broadcast on Classic FM on 4 April.