Winning the Prix de Rome usually spelled death for any young composer - few of the dry, academic essays submitted for the award had any lasting impact on the real musical world. Unfortunately, it was death that spelled death for Lili Boulanger. Shortly after becoming the first woman to win the prize in 1913, she succumbed to Crohn's disease at the age of 25.

Boulanger remains one of the great "what ifs" of 20th century music. The nature of her illness meant that she knew death would come swiftly, and it is this fatalistic disquiet that propels her prize-winning entry, the dramatic cantata Faust et Hélène, onto a higher plane. Most apprentice composers would have struggled to set Eugene Adenis's vapid adaptation of Goethe in anything but the most perfunctory manner, but Boulanger transcended the insipid poetry and cut to the metaphysical quick. Like Faust himself, Boulanger knew she was living on borrowed time.

There are few conductors who better understand this troubled sense of urgency than Yan Pascal Tortelier, who studied with Lili's sister, the great composition guru Nadia Boulanger, and did much to bring the cantata in from the cold in a landmark recording with the BBC Philharmonic a couple of years ago.

Soprano Lynne Dawson was on hand to reprise her role as Helen of Troy in that recording; and if the melting ease and swooning beauty of her voice are not enough to launch a thousand ships, they ought to release a small flotilla at the very least. She was well supported by the dark, towering baritone of Paul Whelan's Mephisto- pheles, and the supple, if slightly smaller-scaled tenor of Mark Tucker's Faust.

This, the first instalment of a two-concert exploration of 20th-century French music, offers the unparalleled experience of witnessing Tortelier revel in his element. After the delicate, debilitated murmur of the Boulanger, the second half provided an opportunity to lighten up.

Ravel's tipsy ballet La Valse was an inebriated lurch from the opening burp on the double basses to the erratic brass effusions at the climax. In this kind of form, Tortelier can even make musical fluff like Roussel's Third Symphony sound like finely spun gold; not so much conducting as performing a jerky, spasmodic little dance on the platform. It's hard to know what drives Tortelier at moments like these. Perhaps it's clockwork.