An all-Liszt programme might not be an obvious way to bring in a large audience for an orchestral concert. But it does have the advantage of showing the composer in more than one guise: as virtuoso, innovator and symphonist. The opening works - Liszt's delicate arrangements of his piano pieces St Francis of Assisi and St Francis of Paolo - weave a path between conviviality, piety and large doses of self-assertiveness, rather in the manner of Liszt's own life at the time he composed them. Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic performed both with a blend of subtlety and panache that suited them perfectly.

The Liszt of the Second Piano Concerto is more familiar: flamboyantly exuberant - at times pushing very hard at the boundaries of good taste - yet full of the tenderest lyricism. Enrico Pace's playing was slightly on the heavy-handed side, and he could have shaped the slow passages more gently. On the other hand, this is music that easily suffers from being overegged, and Pace's straightforward approach was quite refreshing.

Each movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony is a self-contained miniature tone poem, or character sketch, of all the main protagonists of Goethe's drama. Inevitably, the devil gets all the best tunes, even when they start off as someone else's. The third movement, representing Mephistopheles, turns all Faust's earnestness on its head, with an evilly wriggly version of the portentous opening and a hilarious fugue. It's difficult not to feel that the idealised character Gretchen comes off worst, represented by music of sanctimonious purity that sounds irritatingly bland, however beautifully it is performed.

But Noseda and the Philharmonic were outstanding in the turbulent first movement, representing Faust. From its ominously unstable opening to its outbursts of manic over-confidence, this was a performance innervated by a gripping balance of drive, anxiety and assertiveness.