The Australian Chamber Orchestra's infrequent visits to Britain with its director Richard Tognetti deserve to be cherished just as much as those by great symphony orchestras like the Cleveland or the Royal Concertgebouw. There's no string band in the northern hemisphere that communicates such energy, such joy in its music-making as the ACO does, nor combines those qualities with such precision and detailed ensemble.

It's a bonus, too, that the orchestra's programmes are so unfailingly varied and ingenious; this one began with CPE Bach and ended with Grieg. Bach's Sinfonia in B flat H658 is a wonderful showcase for the ACO's special qualities, for the hair-trigger immediacy of its responses and, as the music hurtles from one harmonic tease to the next, its delight in surprises; while Tognetti's own arrangement of Grieg's G minor String Quartet displayed the depth and richness of tone that just 17 players can generate, even in a work whose angst sometimes seems rather too insistently contrived.

In between came much less familiar pieces by Peteris Vasks and Giacinto Scelsi. Vasks's fantasia for violin and orchestra Vox Amoris was written three years ago to celebrate Tognetti's 20 years with the ACO. It's a rather mawkish, predictable piece, with a sentimental hymn-like melody spun over sustained chords in its outer sections and a more agitated central episode framed by a pair of solo cadenzas, but nevertheless it makes a good vehicle for Tognetti's burnished tone and unfussy virtuosity. Scelsi's Anâgâmin is a typical meditative product of his middle years, built out of a close-packed aggregate of pitches that is constantly subject to tiny inner shifts of emphasis and pitch, so that everything seems to be happening beneath the surface. It's a mark of the sheer accomplishment of the ACO that it was played with the same alertness and intensity as the late chorale prelude by Brahms that served as a perfect encore.