This concert seemed to deal with extremes. Mostly, it concerned itself with profoundly dark, often austere music, but Shostakovich's First Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings tapped a vein of humour, albeit one heavy with irony.

At the core of this programme were two works inspired by Maundy Thursday and the events leading to the crucifixion. Michael Berkeley's Gethsemani Fragment, scored for string orchestra, is about the fragility and the near fragmentation of faith faced by Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. The tension of the conflicting contrapuntal lines was strongly sustained by conductor Grant Llewellyn so that, as the music's pulse faded, the resolve was strengthened. James MacMillan's The World's Ransoming takes its title from St Thomas Aquinas's Pange Lingua, and some of its musical ideas from the plainsong setting, although for today's audiences the link with medieval Easter music is less audible than the references to Bach. MacMillan uses a solo cor anglais as the main protagonist and the plangency of Celia Craig's sound was as full and eloquent high up in her range as in the sombre low tenor. The instrument's engagement with a succession of paired instruments balanced beautifully the orchestra's bursts of pain and energy. But, even after the redemptive restatement of the cor anglais's opening material, nothing nailed the attention more forcibly than the final moments when a percussionist uses ordinary carpenters' hammers to strike heavy blows on wood.

Brahms's Tragic Overture and Haydn's Symphony No 95 in C minor framed the evening, so the finesse of pianist Peter Jablonski and trumpeter Philippe Schartz in the Shostakovich marked the only leavening of proceedings, but the warm reception suggests that such rigour was by no means unwelcome.