"Passionate, impulsive, obsessive and of course, most importantly: stark raving mad..." That's how one of the players described Berlioz in a programme note for the National Youth Orchestra's concert with Gianandrea Noseda. The Symphonie Fantastique was the evening's main work - and its emotive subject and startling fluctuations of mood and colour clearly struck chords with players and conductor alike.

With the NYO at its most responsive, Noseda probed the work's heart of darkness with his customary radical intelligence. Some interpreters of late, deeming the score's artist-hero to be unstable from the outset, have approached it primarily as a study in neurosis. Noseda, however, locates the start of the hero's decline in the third movement, as betrayal looms and benevolent nature suddenly turns threatening. Up to that point, Noseda exposed a world of Romantic optimism with the first movement bubbling over with excitement and the ball scene a model of poise and grace. Once past the halfway mark, though, the descent into chaos was brutally swift and unremitting in its intensity.

The first half of the concert was more uneven. Noseda split the orchestra into sections, prefacing Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments with Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. The Stravinsky was played with jazzy verve and considerable panache, though the NYO's practice of doubling and trebling parts led to an occasionally inappropriate thickness of orchestral sound and problems of balance between the NYO and soloist Alexander Korsantya. Tchaikovsky's Serenade, on the other hand, benefitted from the textural richness of large forces. The recurring chordal phrases that fashion the work into a unity had something of the weight of Russian Orthodox choral music, conferring spiritual depth on to a score that is sometimes seen as inconsequential, while the central elegy was shorn of its sentimental connotations and veered towards tragedy. A haunting performance, beautifully played.