Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment / Wallfisch / Levin, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

A spirited, inelegant farewell

Ending a piece by having its performers drop out, one by one, was, no doubt, an idea waiting to be discovered long before Haydn composed his "Farewell" Symphony, No 45 in F sharp minor, in 1772. And certainly it has been imitated since – in Stockhausen's Kontra-punkte, for instance. None the less, Haydn's ending retains a unique aura – and not just because it was devised as a hint to his princely employer to allow his servants to pack for home.

Pitched in a key so remote as to imperil the very intonation of the instruments of Haydn's day, this is an extraordinary work; its violently disruptive opening Allegro and finale held apart only by a remotely unquiet adagio and an edgy Menuet – and then suddenly turning, after all the storm and stress, to a stately dance of departure.

In its latest concert for the South Bank's Haydn festival, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, directed by its lead violin, Elizabeth Wallfisch, chose to play the ending as deadpan comedy, rather missing the mood of profound valediction that can be generated by a slower tempo and gentler phrasing. But that only confirmed a certain bias that had run through the whole evening toward exuberant high spirits – if occasionally at the cost of elegance and poise. One felt the want of those qualities in the Andantino middle movement of Haydn's late Piano Trio in E flat, Hob XV: 29, which he marked, perhaps with a sly smile, "innocentemente" – though Wallfisch, her cellist Richard Lester and that celebrated fortepianist Robert Levin proved utterly irrepressible in the outer movements.

Levin also threatened to rampage in his cadenzas in Mozart's piano Concerto No 18 in B flat, K456 before the interval, and perhaps could have lingered longer in his direction of the poignant final bars of the wonderful G minor variations comprising the slow movement. But the outer movements were replete with spontaneous flights, with Levin demonstrating that his slender-toned instrument could hold its own even against an orchestra with some 23 strings.

In many ways, the concert's greatest delight was its opening item: Haydn's three-movement Notturno No 7 in F major, Hob II:28. One of a sequence of serenade-like pieces he initially wrote for the King of Naples, this is scored for flute, oboe, two horns, two violins, two violas, cello and bass. Yet thanks to the brightness and warmth of the instrumental writing, and the resonant openness of the textural spacing, how those mere 10 instruments sound!