There's no more challenging piece in Olivier Messiaen's output than his massive orchestral cycle, Des Canyons aux Etoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), a 12-movement work that is both his largest orchestral piece and a profoundly moving spiritual journey. But the players of the National Youth Orchestra of the Netherlands gave a thrilling, visceral performance, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw, that was as committed and insightful as any professional performance. In fact, De Leeuw managed something with these young players that few performances of this piece ever do: he made Messiaen's music sound radiantly lyrical, connecting the whole 90-minute piece with a mysterious musical momentum.

You can tell that Canyons contains some of Messiaen's most extreme orchestral imagination from the very opening movement, The Desert, a series of fragmentary gestures - a soaring piccolo note, a dissonant horn fanfare, a solo for wind machine - which are simply placed next to one another. The whole piece is inspired by the canyons and the birdsong of Utah, and Messiaen translates the exoticism of this elemental landscape into a riot of orchestral imagination. He makes the double bass produce a weird, yelping animal call in the fifth movement, Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe, and creates a celestial chiming from the whole orchestra in the 10th movement.

Most astonishing of all was horn player William Purvis's performance of his solo movement, the Interstellar Call, in which his single line was amplified by the resonating strings of the piano, creating a vibrating halo around his microtonal trills and melismas. The essential joy of Messiaen's music, its ecstatic celebration of nature, of birdsong, and of spirituality, reached its climax in the final movement, Zion Park and the Celestial City, an explosion of colour that ended with a major chord of blazing intensity, brilliantly realised by De Leeuw and the young Dutch players.