Rachmaninov's Third Symphony and his one-act opera Francesca da Rimini are both about memory. Dramatising Canto V of the Inferno, the opera repeatedly stresses Dante's famous statement that hell is happiness recalled in times of chronic misery. The Symphony, written in 1938 during Rachmaninov's exile, evokes an already spectral, pre-Soviet Russia. It is a curiously muted work, its faded beauty shot through with intimations of profound disturbance.

Hearing them together in this concert with Gianandrea Noseda conducting the BBC Philharmonic was to be reminded of their links. The broad melody that kicks off the symphony's slow movement resembles a passage in the opera in which Francesca's suspicious husband Lanceotto expresses his uncontrollable passion for his wife; here, though, the tune is purged of its desperation.

Francesca da Rimini also inhabits a post-Baudelairean, decadent territory that awkwardly views a moment's sexual fulfilment as being worth the price of damnation. Noseda went to extremes with it, unleashing churning orchestral storms, ruthlessly exposing Lanceotto's violent soul, and filling the love scenes with a reckless excitement.

Not all of it worked. There are too few BBC Singers to fully register the caterwauling of the damned. As Francesca, Svetla Vassileva had trouble with the treacherously high pianissimos, but she was redeemed by great vocal performances from Mishap Didier, as Paolo, and Sergey Morse, evil as Lanceotto.

The Symphony, however, was superlatively done, with every emotional shift and jolt wonderfully realised. The clear, sensuous sound of the BBC Philharmonic precludes sentimentality in Rachmaninov. The first movement had a sombre grace, the adagio a dignity and the finale a nervous restlessness.