Nothing was predictable about the three popular items conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Philharmonia's latest visit to the capital.

There is an impish, even impetuous, quality about his conducting, though where it matters he beats with military precision.

It was just that in launching this concert with Prokofiev's Classical Symphony he seemed to be in a hurry, missing little of the work's airy quality but forcing one to consider it in retrospect, so often breathless were its tempi.

In the Grieg Piano Concerto, he settled into a more conventional address, obviously knowing that the soloist, Lars Vogt, would turn a work often mistakenly remembered for its compression into the most warm and expansive of deliveries.

The St David's Hall programme annotator, Peter Reynolds, named Vogt's performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle as his recommended recording, and few would argue with this, and it is a credit to Vogt that he made the work's more rhetorical passages part of his total vision, as concerned with the seduction of its harmonies as with the inevitability of its procession of themes.

Many musicians, pre-eminently Ravel, have orchestrated Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky's tableau of scenes for piano, to which can be added one by Ashkenazy, played at this concert.

Ravel's is still the benchmark, lightening Mussorgsky's sombre mood. Ashkenazy's version is darker and less subtle in fulfilling its task, but no other orchestra and conductor could have wrung more from it.