OAE / Levin, Queen Elizabeth Hall London

In the late 1780s, alongside the teenage Beethoven in the Bonn Elector's Orchestra sat his exact contemporary, friend and aspiring fellow-composer Antonin Reicha (1770-1836). In due course, Beethoven left for Vienna to study with Haydn, but Reicha eventually established himself in Paris, where he taught Liszt, Berlioz and Gounod, composed innumerable jolly wind quintets and published some weird speculations about polytonality, quartertones and whatnot.

Some of this oddity was audible in Reicha's Overture in D Major with which Elizabeth Wallfisch - directing from the violin - launched the 42 period players of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment into their latest concert. For the main Allegro of this substantial piece is cast in a consistent quintuple (5/8) time - one wonders how rank-and-file players in the 1820s coped with so exotically lopsided a metre.

In content, however, the piece proved a lively cut-and-paste job on the clichés of the early Beethoven style, richly scored and with some quirky turns, but not exactly lingering in the memory.

Whereas Haydn's stripped- down middle period Symphony No 59 in A major (the so-called Fire Symphony), with which Wallfisch opened the second half, lingers to the point of obsession. Here, however, it seemed a mistake to retain the OAE's full complement of 29 strings: much of the first movement's incisiveness and drive, much of the slow movement's stark intentness, was blurred and softened. Haydn's entire orchestra at Esterhaza in the 1760s rarely seems to have exceeded 20 players.

But in any case, a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall had evidently come primarily to hear that vivacious fortepianist Robert Levin direct from the keyboard Beethoven's ebullient Piano Concerto No 1 in C Major and sternly measured Piano Concerto No 3 in C Minor. Here, as usual, one had to adjust to the modest volume of the fortepiano - on this occasion, a restored Viennese instrument from 1802 - relative to the weight of even a period-instrument orchestra. Not surprisingly, some of the most felicitous moments were the quietest - the rapt piano chords over throbbing horns at the end of the first movement development of the C Major, for instance.

In accordance with his views on classical performance, Levin at times inserted decorative flourishes and offered his own improvised rampages by way of first movement cadenzas - rather putting out the tuning of his instrument in the C Major and disrupting the C Minor's mood of contained tragedy.

Elsewhere, however, the audience were evidently captivated by the dash and spontaneity of the readings - as, doubtless, were listeners to BBC Radio 3's live relay of the concert. The man is certainly a communicator.