John Eliot Gardiner's concert with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists revealed the richness of the occasional music that Purcell wrote for the Royal Court. Instead of derivative hackwork, Purcell produced music of ravishing beauty and range in Hail! Bright Cecilia, his Ode for St Cecilia's Day. In Gardiner's performance, the piece became a miniature oratorio, a kaleidoscopic hymn to the emotional power of music.

From Nicholas Brady's text, extolling the virtues of instruments from the noble organ to the airy violin, Purcell creates a sequence of dramatic movements. Bass Michael Bundy sang Purcell's grandiloquent ode to the organ, the "wondrous machine" that no other instrument can stand up to, with pompous charm. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, alto Iestyn Davies and tenor Andrew Busher evoked the soul of the amorous flute and soft guitar with sensuous, melancholy music that culminated in a brief solo for two recorders. All of the soloists were drawn from the Monteverdi Choir, and the ensemble was dazzlingly precise and powerful in the big choral pieces that framed the whole work.

But there was more to these numbers than fanfares of trumpets and drums; in the final paean to Bright Cecilia, the music suddenly focused on the intimacy of a vocal quartet, and the four singers sang the "infinite felicity" of Purcell's suspensions with aching sensitivity. Even in the Birthday Ode for Queen Mary: Come, Ye Sons of Art, Away - a musical celebration for the Queen's last birthday in 1694 - there were moving moments in Gardiner's performance, such as the rapt oboe solo that accompanied soprano Grace Davidson's solo number and the pastoral energy of the final chorus.

Yet the most affecting music in the programme was on a much smaller scale: a duet for two sopranos, O Dive Custos Auricae Domus, an elegy for Queen Mary. The piece ended with a chain of dissonances, as if the music itself were weeping for the dead monarch.