Prom 54, Royal Albert Hall, London

When technique is not enough

Great orchestral playing and great cooking have much in common. The ingredients must be the finest and they must be balanced and blended so that no one stands out to the detriment of others. I had the privilege to hear the Leipzig Ge-wandhaus Orchestra at home in its new concert hall, with its fabulous acoustic, playing Bruckner. It felt like paradise. How, then, would this great, great orchestra cope with the idiosyncracies of the Royal Albert Hall's acoustics? Would it be hobbled? Absolutely not.

And a thing or two might be learnt from the layout of the orchestra – fiddles facing each other, cellos next to first violins, horns tiered in twos, double basses to the left behind the first fiddles and cellos – which produced such a rich balance of sound on Friday night. It was as if the orchestra had been playing in the hall all its life, and a huge audience greeted this, their second Prom.

Nowadays, overtures are eschewed: the concerto is lunged into without so much as a by-your-leave. The young Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos began promisingly, the orchestral violins shimmering quietly in expectation of his entry. This opening of the Sibelius Violin Concerto is one of music's wondrous moments, and Kavakos's first solo, so shyly begun, so beautifully constrained, warmed up to show his magnificent sound. Kavakos has a fantastic technique, and this concerto has many solo cadenzas in which to shine.

But sadly, a big technique seems to be all he has. The passion was charmless, the digging deep into his strings relentless. Why was he playing to himself rather than us? Where were his colours? What lessons he might have learnt from his orchestral peers, in particular the principal viola, the reedy oboe and the clarinets. Only at the end of the slow movement did Kavakos find himself, but the last movement's drama was lost as he made heavy weather of this "polonaise for polar bears".

Mahler's Fourth Symphony could only reveal the noble lineage of the orchestra. Where Kavakos in the Sibelius was brilliant but cold, the orchestra seemed to accept the challenge of making its Mahler the most musical, the most sensitive, with each section so solid, so intelligent in attention to details of phrasing, colours and contrasts, and so miraculously in tune. The soprano Ruth Ziesak's pitch, too, in the final movement was as true as her simplicity and freshness of delivery. The maestro, Herbert Blomstedt, fashioned a dish worthy of the greatest of chefs.