Wednesday 6 April, Marlowe Theatre Canterbury.

Can there be a happier musician than Tasmin Little? Appearing to enjoy every note she played, she smiled her way right through Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, finding tremendous warmth and lyricism in it as she went. Little is a very unshowy player too. Dressed in a simple flame coloured dress, she simply stood and played the piece, occasionally leaning in, beaming with delight, towards Kazuki Yamada on the podium or Philharmonia leader, Bradley Creswick. It was a performance completely free of flamboyant histrionics, so all the focus was on her masterly playing – the beautifully controlled cross string work and double stopping in the first movement, a good example. Then she gently teased every possible bit of melodious charm out of the lilting 3/4 Andante, each harmonic perfectly placed.

The diminutive, youthful looking (he’s actually 37) Yamada had already opened the evening with a spirited account of Beethoven’s Overture Leonore 3. He’s an unfussy performer too, but totally on top of the orchestra from which he drew a pleasing, incisive balance between the flute and strings in the slow passages.

One of the secrets of a good performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is not to start too slowly because you need enough momentum to build the tension through the long introductory passage. This, Yamada brought off with aplomb, coaxing strange but engagingly menacing growls from the clarinet before he eventually let rip with full strings and all that tuneful Tchaikovian fervour.

I’ve rarely heard the exquisite horn solo in the Andante Cantabile played quite so evocatively and Yamada really milked the melody from the point when the rest of the orchestra picks it up. Then came a sparky rendering of the Valse with lots of enjoyable attention to detail. It was especially fine when it reached the symphony’s recurrent motif at the end of the movement, pre-figuring the opening of the finale in which Yamada found lush grandiloquence, although his emphasis on the arpeggios in the brass was not always to my taste. I think the Philharmonia’s string sound has really developed in recent years. It is now, almost always, impressively rich and coherent.

Susan Elkin