In a jacket made for a Sumo wrestler and cor-blimey trousers, greying hair mohicaned to cockatoo perfection, Nigel Kennedy is back and in blazing form.

His recent absence from the London platform, busy with his own band in Poland, guaranteed a full loyalist turnout at the Festival Hall for an all-Elgar concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

In an advance fanfare, yesterday he blasted off about the futility of conductors who don't rehearse, asking "why you'd want to wave a stick around when you could be playing an instrument".

But if the crowds turned out expecting tantrums or petulance, they got only a peerless account of the Violin Concerto by one of the finest virtuosos alive.

Yes, he came on punching the air as only Nige can, yes he all but conducted the orchestra himself, leaving Leonard Slatkin obediently, but admirably, shepherding an invigorated RPO, who earlier had given a somewhat workaday account of Elgar's Second Symphony.

Kennedy has a special affinity for this concerto. Written in 1910 for the great Kreisler - with whom Kennedy's father played - this elegiac score soars and dips with restless poetry. He has recorded it twice, first with Vernon Handley then again, "away from the textbook", with Simon Rattle in 1998. A decade on his own performance, idiosyncratic and mannered but always spellbinding, achieves a yet richer imaginative and dynamic range.

What constantly amazes about this classiest of musicians, once written off as shaman and showman, is his phenomenal, natural technique, honed daily with six hours' practice.

As an encore Kennedy asked "But what would we do without these ancient Germans?", a question not often posed it's true, then glittered through the tracery of the Prelude of Bach's E major Partita. It was a perfect and eloquent answer to an audience stunned to silence.