Engage Pierre Boulez to conduct and Cecilia Bartoli as soloist, and you are 99% of the way to ensuring that a gala concert lives up to its name. Last night's, given in aid of the London Symphony Orchestra's education centre and a children's hospice service, certainly fulfilled its billing.
The presence of the Duke of York brought the evening's first cherishable moment - Boulez conducting God Save the Queen. It was a truncated version, delivered with as near to perfunctory efficiency as courtesy would allow. Then straight into Berlioz's Overture to Beatrice and Benedict, which began almost as strait-laced as the national anthem. The opening theme's thrust and parry were distinctly subdued, and the long, lazy theme of the slow section was unusually solemn, yet lit up with unexpected tints and half-tones. Only when the music picked up speed again did it begin to glitter as it should.
Bartoli was there for Berlioz too. She has just added Les Nuits d'Eté to her repertory; no doubt as she sings it more the sense of line and wholeness in each song will grow. But already her performance contains some very special things, not least her total absorption into every phrase of the Gautier poems the cycle sets. Her range of inflection and vocal colour was vast: honeyed effusions for the opening Villanelle, tone thinned down to nearly a whisper for Le Spectre de la Rose. Never have these songs seemed so operatic, never so close to the world of Berlioz's masterpiece The Trojans. After it an encore was essential, and that was Berlioz too, the song Zaide, in which Bartoli revealed another talent, decorating her seductive performance with some dashing castanets.
Boulez then tackled a work that has long been one of his party pieces - Ravel's complete ballet Daphnis et Chlöe. With an orchestra as dazzlingly accomplished as the LSO it must be a delight to conduct, for every fleck of colour in this iridescent score can be realised. The immaculate ensemble and virtuosic elan of the playing were often breathtaking. But Boulez now is far, far more than just a supreme technician on the podium: he brings a work like Daphnis fully to dramatic life. Using an elasticity of pulse to shape the episodic score into utterly coherent paragraphs, he imbues the music for the two lovers with languorous sensuality and the moments of high tension with a palpable sense of menace. It's hard to imagine the work better conducted, or played.
• A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
