Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Southbank Centre, review "Not all orchestras are the same," proclaims the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on its publicity, a nicely oblique and British way of saying, "we're different." One of the things that makes the OAE different is its refusal to go along with the cult of the conductor. If they feel a programme can be handled perfectly well without a maestro, that's what they do; as was the case on Tuesday. Two of the four works were purely orchestral, and here the task of co-ordinating the players fell on the orchestral leader. On this occasion that chair was filled by Margaret Faultless, who fulfilled the role with grace and tact. True, those steely, minatory chords that punctuate Beethoven's Coriolan Overture would have been more perfectly attacked with a conductor at the helm. But the sense of a body of players keenly listening to each other was pleasurable in itself. It glowed even more brightly in the closing work, Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. This had a genial soft-edged quality, so much more winning than the pert, too-precise articulation often marks "period-instrument" performances of this piece. Everything was so natural one was hardly aware of the OAE's old-style instruments and playing style - apart from in the Trio of Beethoven's symphony, where one suddenly became aware of delightfully rustic "old" horns and clarinets. But in the two works that came in between, the curious sound of old instruments was inescapable, not always in a good way. In Mendelssohn's Concerto in A flat for two pianos (written when the composer was only fifteen), the two light-brown early nineteenth-century pianos placed centre-stage looked pretty well identical. But they were distractingly different in sound. Or was it simply that Robert Levin on the right was so much more emphatic - not to say domineering - than the tenderly pliable, not to say submissive Ya-Fei Chuang on the left? If these two had wanted to give us a lesson in how 19th-century sexual politics were mirrored in music, they couldn't have done it better. That, added to the maddening garrulousness of Mendelssohn's piece, made for a peculiar experience. All these distractions were banished in Schubert's great F minor Fantasy for piano duet, where both pianists were seated at the same piano. In the mysterious dusky colours of the first movement's central section, and the tender give and take of the slow movement, they were absolutely as one. Sound and sense came satisfyingly together. Hear this concert until Dec 4 on the BBC iPlayer