When Paris’s Philharmonie opened a fortnight ago, Thierry Escaich’s new Concerto for Orchestra was programmed along with Dutilleux, Fauré and Ravel. Escaich is also a virtuoso organist, following Duruflé at St Étienne-du-Mont. In this Composer Portrait, given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, these credentials proved to be implicit in the fabric of his music.

There is nothing minimal about the scores. On the contrary, there are vast torrents of notes – like César Franck or Fauré on speed – yet such is their energy and buoyancy that the listener is carried irresistibly in the flow. To counterbalance this apparently unstoppable force, Escaich concerns himself with structure and, in characteristically French fashion, also explores the colour and timbres of sound, with sometimes cataclysmic peaks.

Baroque Song was played with a vibrant immediacy, conductor Franck Ollu cutting brisk swathes through the air. In the atmospheric Miroir d’Ombres – effectively a double concerto – the essential drama of Escaich’s language is played out in the search both for unity and individual identity of the violin and cello, with Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian and Xavier Phillips the unshowy but compelling soloists. Against the flood of passagework, lyrical lines carry a necessarily orientating function, but the BBCNOW musicians also invested them with a sweetness that was again disarming.

In a second half focusing on works with a religious context, Adrian Partington conducted the excellent BBC National Chorus of Wales in Trois Motets, with Jonathan Hope the fine organist. But finally it was Ollu who brought to the orchestral Vertiges de la Croix – a latter-day tone poem inspired by Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross – an intensity that seemed to bridge past and present.