Lenten music didn't begin and end with Bach. For this seasonal programme, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment turned to Haydn, and to the young UK conductor Daniel Harding.

Harding's style - sweeping, broad-gestured and, one would think, utterly exhausting - might look a touch romantic for this repertoire. This told in some ensemble playing that was not quite as precise as it can be from this group, and in the odd lapse in intonation. However, the dynamism he encouraged from the players in Haydn's Symphony No 49, known as La Passione, was evident.

The first movement, with its low sonorities and slow tread, was carefully shaped, with questioning violin figures left hanging in the air. The turmoil of the second, with its punchy cross-rhythms, was a complete contrast. Two horns added richness to the third, crowning the trio with a high arc of notes; they cracked on it once but played it so persuasively the other three times that you could forgive them. In the fourth movement, however, the amiability was gone, with Harding drawing a buzzing, edgy sound from the strings.

La Passione is only a Lenten piece by mood and reputation: we don't know whether Haydn intended it to be identified with Easter. No such uncertainty, though, about the other work on the programme, The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. It was originally written for orchestra alone; here we heard it in Haydn's later choral version, and were thankfully spared the mini-sermons that would have separated its movements at the 1787 premiere in the cathedral at Cadiz.

With seven Adagios in a row and just one Allegro, this is not a work that always sounds compelling. But Harding took advantage of the clear, expressive, responsive voices of the augmented choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and a quartet of sensitive soloists topped though not dominated by the treblish soprano of Joanne Lunn.

The music is many-faceted. Episodes of horn-backed choral fury morphed in and out of coiled major-key tension; solemn and soothing passages interchanged, with the latter eventually winning out in relief at the moment of death. The final movement, Earthquake, felt like a logical conclusion to the drama.