DONALD Runnicles's concert with the BBC SSO on Thursday night was a provocative affair.

And of what was it provocative? Of thought. On paper it was a lovely bouquet, with two great French masterpieces, La Mer and La Valse, bookending a central section that included Sally Beamish's lost-and-found-and-reinvented Cello Suite by Debussy, along with Ravel's super-sophisticated Valse nobles et sentimentales.

But little, in an extraordinary sequence of interpretations and performances, was quite as it seemed. La Valse symbolises the implosion of decadence and the collapse of an era, but Runnicles took Ravel's mad, mad music to the precipice and, with his band playing giddily and convulsively, watched it whirl itself and its epoch into oblivion. It was gripping then terrifying; it was an observation of life out of control. And it was prefigured in a remarkable performance of the Valse nobles which, as refined as it is, progressively seemed to contain the seeds of that demise.

As for La Mer: this was forensic stuff. It was a great performance, with every surge and swell of the sea mapped to precision. But it was more than that. It was a thoroughgoing analysis of Debussy's texturing and his means of achieving fluidity. If you could have shone a spotlight through this translucent texture, you would have perceived the elements of Debussy's teeming music knitting and binding in invisible but complete organic integrity. Runnicles's balancing of the orchestral innards of the music was mesmerising.

In the middle of all this complexity, cellist Steven Isserlis's beautiful performance of Sally Beamish's exquisite Debussy re-creation was an oasis of serenity.

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