A concert of Mozart, Mozart, Mozart and Mozart. If the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra can't wave the flag for Austria's most beloved composer, who can? Constanza, Mozart's widow, founded the orchestra in her old age precisely to perpetuate his music. They're certainly perpetuating it on this current tour. Yet is this wise? You may eat nothing but baked beans and live; yet you would not be healthy.

Here too I missed necessary vitamins, not so much in Wolfgang Amadeus, but in the general approach. Not for Ivor Bolton the brusque pirouettes some artists lavish on music of this period. Long experienced in baroque and early classical music, the orchestra's chief conductor forces no rhythm, distorts no gesture, and is never prissy over articulation.

There's sanity here. But for this plain approach to convince, it helps if the orchestra's playing is clean and vivid, burnished with character. That doesn't describe the Mozarteum strings on Monday night. They had two options: muscular vim or golden blend, but landed upon a mush in the middle.

Symphony No 34, starting the programme, glided past without incident, even when Mozart notated inviting syncopated rhythms. Help arrived with the concerto soloists, both from the orchestra's ranks. In the flute concerto, K313, Bernhard Krabatsch started out suspiciously dull, but grace and expression multiplied in the heartfelt adagio - Mozart's inspiration reaches a different level here - and the perky finale.

Then Johannes Hinterholzer, right hand permanently inside his horn bell, left hand managing the valves, generated mellifluous beauties in K495, the fourth horn concerto. Well, not entirely mellifluous: when you're generating two pitches at once, as in the first cadenza, you're practically guaranteed a rasp. No rasping, happily, in the andante, feather-light in Hinterholzer's two hands, and the robust rondo finale.

On, then, to Symphony No 40. Plenty of vigour here from the orchestra and Bolton's bouncing beat. Yet this was still music-making lacking personality. And this symphony is no place for playing safe: it's a nervous chameleon, urgent and jagged. Being Mozart experts is a fine thing, though not when his music's flattened into the ordinary.

Editor's choice

• Proms Podcast with Danielle De Nisse
• The Bachchan tour is dynamite!
• Dark Knight storms to $155m record