Dvorak is one of Nikolaus Harnoncourt's recent enthusiasms. His voracious appetite for new fields to explore has carried him ever further from his beginnings as a pioneering interpreter of baroque and classical repertory and deeper and deeper into the 19th century. Brahms and Bruckner have already been tackled; now he has begun to record the Dvorak symphonies and symphonic poems, and the first half of his glorious concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe was devoted to the set of Slavonic Dances, Op 46.

These enduringly popular pieces could have been an unprepossessing start - there is the ever-present danger of over-familiarity, and anyone who has played in a youth orchestra is almost certainly to have learned at least one of them. But from the opening bars of the first dance, the whirling C major Furiant, it was clear that Harnoncourt was going to sweep away all traces of routine - the COE's playing sparkled, the rhythms had a insistent energy, the orchestral colours were vivid. With each movement there was the renewed sense of discovery, whether in the delicate woodwind and string tracery of the E minor second dance, the burnished, mahogany beginning of the fourth, or the stabbing accentuation that lifted each of the faster numbers on to a far higher plane than that of a mere orchestral lollipop. These were interpretations of the most extraordinary re-creative kind.

If after that the Pastoral Symphony seemed less exceptional, it was only because Harnoncourt's Beethoven is much more of a known quantity - he has, after all, recorded a complete cycle of the symphonies with the COE. But still in every movement there was something fresh and revealing - the subtle contrast between vibrato and non-vibrato in the strings' chording, and the supple layering of opening Allegro; the assault on the scherzo that was less Beethoven's "Merry Gathering in the Country" than a harking back to the world of Sturm und Drang; the broad, hymn-like paragraphs of the finale - and all was fabulously played.