You wouldn't expect to pack out a concert hall for music by Heinrich Biber, but that's exactly what Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort did here, luring people in with the promise of a more famous Requiem - Mozart's - if they sat through Biber's version first.

And Biber, who died 300 years ago, did well out of it, though his work didn't exactly find an ideal home in the QEH. He preceded Mozart as court composer at Salzburg by around a century, and wrote the Requiem for the cathedral there; he probably deployed his choir, strings and sonorous sackbuts into the galleries around the cathedral's dome, though those spatial effects were largely absent here.

Still, even without them, enough of the expression and interest in Biber's writing came across - the angry, insistent rhythms at the Dies Irae, for example, and the golden major-key glow at the final mention of Lux aeterna. McCreesh plans to bring us more Biber this year, and no bad thing.

Still, most people were there for the Mozart, including a classy quartet of soloists, underpinned by Christopher Purves's ringing bass and topped by Marie Arnet's gleaming soprano. This was the Consort's first real venture into classical territory. If the hard-edged rasp of the period bassoon in the opening solo wasn't what we were used to, then that set the tone for the performance. McCreesh's propulsive speeds and the orchestra's clear, astringent sound, erased any lingering thoughts of old-fashioned choral-society trudges. Equally, memories of this unfinished work as it is usually heard, in the completion by Mozart's pupil Süssmayr, were pushed aside by hearing some different ideas from Duncan Druce, who prepared his own version 20 years ago. His completion is less heavy-handed than Süssmayr's. But it will need the continued advocacy of people like McCreesh if it is to even come close to supplanting the version that, for better or worse, we know and love.