Was Tchaikovsky one of music's great innovators? Most people would probably answer in the negative, arguing that the psychodramatic nature of his inspiration is aligned with elements of conservatism when it comes to structure and form. That such a view is dangerously blinkered was proved by the final instalment of Gianandrea Noseda's Tchaikovsky cycle with the BBC Philharmonic. The Second and Sixth Symphonies formed the programme and Noseda, without losing sight of the music's often draining emotional content, placed the emphasis on Tchaikovsky's need to break with conventional symphonic form in his search for a psychological vent for his feelings.

Placed side by side, the two symphonies seem like mirror images of each other. Both derive their power from the effective displacement of the slow movement. The Second sustains a mood of near mania in its attempts to shrug off the pervasive melancholy of its opening Andante. In an effective reversal of the Second's emotional trajectory, the Sixth, the Pathétique, collapses into its agonised closing Adagio after all its existential possibilities are exhausted.

The performances, compounded of virtuosity and intensity, were hair-raising. Rhythmic dislocation seemed omnipresent, heaving its way to the surface in the scherzo of the Second and the limping waltz of the Sixth. That the finale of the Second didn't quite work was due to Tchaikovsky's over-reliance on thematic repetition rather than any lack of intensity or drive on Noseda's part. The Pathétique, meanwhile, was a phenomenal rethink of a symphony both taken for granted and sentimentalised. Mythically bound up with the circumstances of Tchaikovsky's death, the work is read usually as a horoscope of disaster or a suicidal confession. Here, however, we were presented with a carefully controlled confrontation with mortality, shattering in its universal resonance - the work of a man who held a mature, tragic vision of the world, yet who had, perhaps, everything to live for.