Peter Lieberson's five songs to poems by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda have quickly become renowned since their first performance in 2005. The reason for their special status is that these intensely personal love songs were written to and for the composer's late wife, the mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died from cancer a year after giving the premiere and recording them. Since the songs are so personal and because Hunt Lieberson had a vocal presence of an almost Callas-like intensity, she is a hard, not to say an impossible, act to follow.

But if any British mezzo has the artistry to succeed, it is Sarah Connolly, who gave the UK premiere in this opening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's winter season under the direction of Jirí Belohlávek. Brighter-voiced and less emotive than Hunt Lieberson, Connolly rightly took her own route. As a result, she seemed to shift some of the weight of the cycle away from the wrenching third and fifth songs, which both confront the beloved's death, and placed it instead on the more life-affirming first and fourth songs. It is a moot point how far the cycle will exist outside the shadow cast by its origins, but Connolly proved that it can and should be attempted.

Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, unremarkably played, is also saturated with love and death, but this was programming of dubious taste alongside the poignancy of the Lieberson songs. Dvorák's seventh symphony, however, represented an entire change of mood, although Belohlávek's urgent approach underlined the work's ambition and drama as well as its characteristically more genial and vigorous qualities.