There is no doubt Robert Levin is a fine pianist but as a conductor, I find him extremely distracting.

Tall, lean and dressed in black, he opened the Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment's concert in energetic mode with Beethoven's Prometheus Overture.

He conducts from the waist upwards, using his head, shoulders and torso to direct the orchestra and moves his arms and hands up and down at speed.

He resembled nothing quite so much as a black beetle on speed trying to escape from a jam jar in which it had been imprisoned.

And it is worse when he conducts from the piano. Here, some delicate playing was interrupted when he suddenly turned towards the orchestra and began waving frantically.

By contrast, the orchestra's own director, Margaret Faultless, is Faultless by name and faultless by nature.

With just a nod of her head and an occasional wave of her bow, she signalled what she wanted and got exactly the right result.

She and her colleagues gave a flawless performance of Mendelssohn's String Symphony No 9 and there was nothing at all distracting about her work.

This was clearly focussed, concentrated and disciplined music-making of a very high standard as befits the members of one of the foremost period instrument orchestras in the world.

But back to Robert Levin. He performed two of the great piano concertos, Beethoven's fourth and Mendelssohn's first.

By using a period fortepiano instead of a modern piano, you get a much lighter sound. In some ways, this opens up the music a little more and lets it breathe.

However, to my 21st-Century ears, the fortepiano sounded a little too thin. I guess I like my Beethoven to be gloomier and a little more dramatic.

But Levin did his stuff well. He brought out the tremendous beauty of the piece and his work in the cadenzas was exciting, vivid and thrilling.

When he is seated at the piano stool, Levin is a wonderful player. He just needs to stop leaping around so much when he is in conducting mode.