If ever there was a millstone around the neck of a British woman cellist it's the Elgar concerto.

Natalie Clein's way of deflecting criticism is to attack the work full on in terms of her concert opportunities and her actual performances. In other words, by not admitting that there's a problem at all.

The perceived problem, of course, is the memory of Jacqueline du Pré, and in at least one sense comparisons are not so much odious as interesting.

Part of the interest lies in the existence of two recordings of the work - du Pré's with the Hallé Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli and Clein's with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under (the now the late) Vernon Handley.

There's a huge time gap between the two, and the more one listens to the earlier recording the more one appreciates how Handley's comes at the concerto with a more rigorous approach, a characteristic of another one of his Elgar recordings - the landmark one of the Violin Concerto with Nigel Kennedy and the London Philharmonic.

Conductor Edward Gardner's input at this concert involved leaving Clein very much to her own devices while never abdicating the Philharmonia's responsibility to the work's essentially emotionally accompaniment. It's hardly an accompaniment at all but a searing environment in which are fused nostalgia and strong ambivalent passions, which the soloist is ever articulating.

Contrast this with his and the orchestra's reading of the Elgar First Symphony as a work displaying the swagger of confidence, even in the extraordinary slow movement - though all Elgar's slower passages are of a profound emotional order - while avoiding the charge of triumphalism, Edwardian or other. This was nobility pure and simple, just made for an orchestra of aristocratic demeanour.

The pairing of the symphony with the concerto is always welcome, as it gives us Elgar early and late, the reflective (though not passive) nature of the latter allowing a sensitive but 'modern' cellist such as Clein to furthere clarify the connections.

The concert, the latest in the hall's international series, opened with a rousing version of Wagner's overture to Rienzi. It made way for deeper musical mining.