Mozart's 39th Symphony has long been thought of as one of his most radiant masterpieces, with its soft-focused orchestral colours dominated by clarinets and horns.

But Philippe Herreweghe's performance with his Orchestre des Champs Elysées revealed another side to the piece. Instead of a sumptuous wallowing in a secondhand performance tradition, this was a vivid and at times violent rethink of one of the most familiar pieces in the repertoire.

Even in the slow introduction to the first movement, Herreweghe stressed the music's dark undercurrents. Rushing upward scales in the violas and cellos took the piece into dangerous regions of chromaticism; the climax was a crunching dissonance that fractured the orchestra into its various sections, and resolved achingly slowly into the major-key Allegro.

Here again, Herreweghe and his players stripped away the patina of conventional thinking about this music. Instead of focusing on the lyricism of the main theme, he highlighted the rhythmic music that dominates the centre of the movement, giving the piece an obsessive, relentless energy.

The players, using period instruments, were never narrowly dogmatic in their adherence to so-called "authentic" playing practices. In the slow movement, the string players used vibrato to colour their lines, and the wind players relished Mozart's lyrical writing.

But it was the music's dark drama that was the focus of Herreweghe's performance. The explosion at the heart of the movement, with its rasping horns and leaping string lines, was shockingly powerful; the moment seemed to reverberate even after the genial Menuetto and the bucolic finale.

Collegium Vocale Gent, another ensemble founded by Herreweghe, joined the orchestra in a performance of Mozart's C minor Mass. The opening Kyrie is one of the most imposing movements Mozart ever wrote, and here, the choir captured both a sense of spiritual awe and human warmth.

Many of the choral movements, like the Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi, are based on baroque forms; the choir made this musical archaism sound like a symbol of Mozart's humility in the presence of God.

But it was the range of this performance that was most astonishing. Soprano Anna Korondi's performance of the Et Incarnatus Est was ravishing, and her cadenza, accompanied by a trio of bassoon, flute, and oboe, revealed the essential humanity of Mozart's religious belief.

The performance ended with the chaotic fugue of the Osanna, completing Herreweghe's journey from minor-key melancholy to major-key celebration.