Vienna Philharmonic/Maazel, Royal Festival Hall, London

The virtues of Viennese tradition

So, here's the world's most traditional orchestra with a harpsichord and half-strength strings. Wonders never cease. Would they be using 18th-century bows and period style? Since the conductor was the thoughtful Lorin Maazel, and the programme an individual mix of Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn, you couldn't tell.

It didn't take long to find out: as long as the first chord of Bach's B minor suite, which the players didn't so much attack as inflate. This was Viennese business as usual, with shapely, instinctive phrasing and vibrato. The virtues lay elsewhere, and were substantial: light and shade, lively rhythm at an unforced pace, and great lucidity as the lines of Bach's busy textures fell into place with apparent ease. How often do you simply hear so much when style is the main concern? The principal flautist, Meinhart Niedermayr, stood at the front like a soloist but balanced himself in and out of the foreground as required. The totally musical performance, without fuss or frills, went some way to reclaiming a place for Bach in symphony concerts. Perhaps in Vienna he never lost it, but for London the experience was salutary.

After this appealing start came the Mozart symphony with four horns, his youthful G minor one. It's another piece that inspires affection, partly because of the scoring and partly for its expressive character. Another desk of strings arrived, and the start was as fierce as if it were minor-key Haydn. Again the sound was uncannily transparent without contrivance: the oboe solos in the opening movement, the suave bassoon support in the next, the oscillating inner string parts of the Minuet seemed more present than usual. The greatest pleasure came with the episode that separates off the wind into an octet, half of it horns, playing with quiet precision.

On to Mendelssohn, with another desk of strings again. The world of Mendelssohn, Maazel said later when he introduced the encores, "one can never visit often enough." Good for him: the music is so fluent that it's easily taken for granted, but with scrupulous and straightforward playing such as this, fired up by commitment, it dazzles not only with skill and warmth but with a unique immediacy and freshness, which even the prodigal Mozart didn't possess.

Ironically, the performances weren't as revealing as those at the Barbican earlier this season from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, which used fewer strings. But they were right on a level with the rest of the concert, buoyant and alive; the outer movements of the "Italian" Symphony were all the more exciting for being danced rather than driven, the energy coming from finely judged accents and a sure sense of the dramatic high points. Lyrical feeling was rightly to the fore also in the "Hebrides" overture, which rather fell apart at the end: if you're going to slow down the clarinets' tune to half-tempo, you surely have to go over-speed in the final flare-up to balance out the musical tensions.

The orchestra's virtuosity was in the details, such as the leadback into the return of the symphony's not-quite-scherzo, a breathtaking and subtle feat of minutely controlled pace and dynamics. So it was with the encore of Mozart's Figaro overture, played ultra-fast for the one time in the concert, but brilliantly articulated and just as considered as everything that had gone before.