The past few weeks have seen a series of farewells to the Festival Hall as performers effectively take their leave of the building before it closes for refurbishment. The Philharmonia was the last orchestra to leave, an event they were determined to mark in style by throwing a party for the entire audience in the foyer after the main concert.

The experience was a bit surreal. The RFH is already a building site and people clutching glasses of champagne milled about, through half-empty shops. The orchestra set itself up as a cabaret band near the bar, playing Piazzolla tangos and Kurt Weill standards. The evening's conductor and soloist - Vladimir Ashkenazy and Hélene Grimaud - briefly stilled the babble with a performance of the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly Suite.

The main concert ended with an encore of the final movement of Haydn's Farewell Symphony, in which the players left the platform one by one in gathering darkness. Before that came an exciting, if rather strange, programme in which Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto was flanked by two orchestral versions of piano works, Balakirev's Islamey and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Balakirev's clattering evocation of Caucasian folk music came in a version by his pupil Sergei Liapunov, a ritzy showpiece, effectively performed. Ashkenazy used his own edition for Mussorgsky's musical art collection. It steers the work closer to the composer's own orchestral writing than Ravel's more familiar scoring, though it is less vivid and incisive. The Ashkenazy version of Gnomus, for instance, is grotesque, where Ravel's scares you half to death.

The Rachmaninov, meanwhile, was a sumptuous, moody affair, launched with unnerving heft by Grimaud, whose playing was typically ruminative and visionary. There were some extraordinary moments in the middle, when the music approaches trickling near-stillness, while the outer sections were displays of lofty high Romanticism, often symphonic in their magnitude.