Across the world thrusting young violinists are two a penny, but there is only Julia Fischer. There’s not a flashy bone in her body, neither an itchy one; at 23, she seems to have vaulted straight across preening adolescence into Olympian wisdom. The rapt calm of her pianissimos in her Beethoven Violin Concerto, climaxing this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, certainly came from the mountain top. Slimmed of vibrato, with a still beauty so hard to achieve, this would have been remarkable playing at any age.

In technique she has little left to learn; and for all her poise she’s not a cold fish. Her armour’s only chink is a humour deficiency. Beethoven’s finale provides numerous chances for puckish behaviour; Fischer ignored them all. That did lower the temperature slightly.

No heat shortfall in the orchestra, though. Whether reclining in the larghetto’s song or pulsing through the mighty allegro, David Zinman kept the BBC orchestra boiling. Likewise in the Brahms Third Symphony finale – those slashing tutti chords, the taut rhythms! A pity about the other two movements: slick, but impersonal.

Aside from Fischer, this concert unveiled another, less likely, star – the Scottish composer Alasdair Nicolson. His BBC commission The Broken Symphony, broken in two, launched each half of the concert. The BBC tried this splitting trick earlier this season with Simon Bainbridge; it didn’t work. Nicolson survived by weaving his threads tightly, cycling through a stream of laments – some Celtic moans, one from Ancient Persia – with puncturing accompaniments of mounting speed and complexity.

The Iraq War, among other world horrors, was in his mind, Nicolson told us: a broken symphony for a broken world. Not all of that impulse came through: with those busy textures and the electric playing, much of the two ten-minute movements fizzed like a brilliant concerto for orchestra. Yet the keening note always returned; at the end we were definitely adrift in desolation. A most stimulating piece, which deserves a future; hear it on May 31, when the concert is on Radio 3.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010