Despite the controversy which surrounded the work at the time of its premiere, Anthony Payne's completion of Elgar's Third Symphony (or "Elaboration of the Sketches", to use Payne's own phrase) has won a permanent place in the repertory - so much so, that Elgar's other symphonies have tended to slip from view of late.

It's already been recorded twice. Many British conductors have championed the work. American Elgarian Leonard Slatkin conducted the New York premiere last year. This was his first performance of it in the UK.

Having presented Payne with honorary membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society, Slatkin gave us an interpretation which was predictably different from many we've heard before, though equally valid. In place of an emotional pattern of energy and collapse, grandeur and exhaustion, Slatkin takes his cue from the fact that some of Elgar's sketches derive from a projected oratorio about the last judgment, and drives the symphony with a nervous, terrifying vigour. The result is scarily apocalyptic. Even the muted trumpet and clattering tambourine of the scherzo have an ominous chill. The whole culminates in a relentless march into oblivion, which is disquieting in the extreme.

Slatkin brackets it with James MacMillan's Sinfonietta, a brief spiritual odyssey from heaven to hell and back again. There were plenty of fabulous textures here - ethereally squeaking saxophones, pellucid strings, clangorous brass. Slatkin also emphasised the work's debt - intentional or otherwise - to Wagner's Parsifal. It's powerhouse stuff, emphasising MacMillan's inspirational decline of late.

Sandwiched between these two was Sibelius's Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell as soloist, fine-toned, technically staggering, yet somehow failing to get to the dark heart of the work's drama. The overall effect was of a romantic reverie. Sibelius's concerto needs more ferocity than Bell can supply.