After returning for the third time to acknowledge the applause from a capacity audience Joshua Bell pointed to his watch. Was he off to catch a plane or afraid of incurring musicians’ union overtime payments?

Perhaps it was to indicate the speed at which he and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields had just despatched Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. With modest chamber forces, just two basses, and directed from the leader’s chair by Bell this was an Eroica light on its feet, well articulated and irredeemably small-scale both dynamically and emotionally.

Bell’s approach suited the capering scherzo but the funeral march was too often a trot with Beethoven’s dissonances and asperities smoothed away. If the Eroica is a musical Himalayas this performance was strictly Clent Hills. The punch line of Beethoven’s joke in the finale – the little dance theme nervously tiptoeing in – fell flat because it lacked the requisite big orchestral build up.

A performance of Brahms’ violin concerto by a soloist of Bell’s immense talent cannot fail to have some passages of great beauty; here the slow movement did, and the first movement’s flourish with Bell’s bow pointing skywards drew a round of applause. But his decision to conduct (Maxim Vengerov School of vague arm-waving) made the concerto tasteful rather than titanic. Nothing to frighten the horses – nothing to make the angels weep. Bell’s decision to play Bach’s Chaconne from the second Partita for solo violin in an execrable and superfluous arrangement with string orchestra, by Julian Milone, was unfathomable.