When it's played with the ferocious intensity of Louis Langrée's performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique sounds like one of the most modern pieces in the repertoire. Langrée and the LPO thrillingly realised Berlioz's orchestral effects, like the deathly rattles of the string instruments in the final movement, or the vivid premonition of the hero's fate at the end of the slow movement, as a lonely cor anglais line was suspended over the rumbles of four timpani.

Langrée created a musical journey that catapulted its hero from the heights of passion in the surging climaxes of the waltzing second movement, to the lows of despair and rejection in the dark heart of the slow movement.

At the end of the fourth movement, the March to the Scaffold, the hero was symbolically defeated: the motto theme, played on a solo clarinet, was extinguished by hammer blows. The conviction of the LPO's performance persuaded the audience that this was the end of the hero's journey, but there was still the final humiliation of the Witches' Sabbath, in which the theme was melted down in a churning cauldron of percussive violence. Langrée led the orchestra in Berlioz's satanic ritual with gleeful, grotesque delight.

He conjured a different kind of illusion in the UK premiere of Kaija Saariaho's Song for Betty, composed for the 80th birthday of Betty Freeman, one of contemporary music's most enthusiastic patrons. The piece is a reworking of music from her recent opera, l'Amour de Loin. Haunting woodwind solos were surrounded by the ethereal extremes of string harmonics and double-bass sonority, an evocation of the emotional and physical distances explored in the opera. Joshua Bell shattered the spell cast by Saariaho's music with a high-octane performance of Bruch's G minor Violin Concerto, and the orchestra responded to the physicality of his playing with a gutsy, impassioned accompaniment.