It sounds like a sinister sci-fi cult, but spectralism is one of the most distinctive movements in recent French music. At the Festival Hall, players from the Philharmonia presented works by its three major figures, creating a potted history of spectral music, which flourished from the mid-1970s. Viola player Rachel Roberts performed the piece that incarnated the movement in 1976: Tristan Murail's C'est un Jardin Secret ... , music of shimmering subtlety and refinement, which grew from a tiny trace of sound into an obsessive repetition of two strange, dissonant chords.

Roberts's expressive performance revealed many of the typical features of spectral music: the use of instrumental colour to create structure, and a forensic focus on the detail of individual sounds and pitches. There is an ascetic, rigorous side to these principles, demonstrated by Hugues Dufourt's Hommage à Charles Nègre, with its static sequence of chords for six players, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The piece was an image of musical isolation, inspired by Nègre's famous 19th-century photographs of chimney sweeps.

But it was Gérard Grisey's Talea that was the concert's most impressive performance. Composed in 1986, the piece revealed the diversity of spectralism and the drama it could create. Scored for five players, the work began with a violent sonic outburst whose aftermath was a ghostly resonance of piano sound. Gradually, the loud intrusions overtook the texture, culminating in music of thumping rhythmic power that was relished by the whole ensemble, from the rumbling depths of the piano's lowest register to the heights of the piercing piccolo part.

For all its novelty, spectralism owes a large debt to earlier French music, and the Philharmonia's later concert, conducted by Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, made the Second Suite from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé sound like a vivid precursor of spectral ideas. The opening evocation of sunrise grew from a wisp of musical fragments into an irresistible blaze of sound.

There was an even more extreme example of timbre as structure in Frübeck de Burgos's performance of Boléro, as that infamous tune transformed itself from an innocuous flute solo into an unstoppable, monomaniacal frenzy for the whole orchestra.