Berlin Staatskapelle/Barenboim

If the first of Daniel Barenboim's Festival Hall concerts juxtaposing Beethoven's five piano concertos with orchestral ­music by Schoenberg was ­memorable, then the second was even more ­remarkable. The pairing was the string-orchestra version of Verklärte Nacht with the fifth concerto, the Emperor, and both performances were charged with a special, insistent urgency. Barenboim's approach to ­conducting has always owed much to Wilhelm Furtwängler, and this surging, sculpted performance of a work that ­Furtwängler did conduct, though apparently only in its original string sextet form, was a perfect example of that influence. The febrile intensity of Wagner's ­Tristan und Isolde seemed to be its starting point, but Barenboim ratcheted that up still further. The strings of the ­Berlin ­Staatskapelle are a wonderfully ­responsive unit, and with their eight double basses arrayed in a line across the back of the platform, the sound was all-enveloping, weighty yet ­buoyant. In the Emperor, too, the ­orchestral playing was exceptional, always alert and tinglingly vivid. Barenboim set off with tremendous elan in the ­opening piano solo, demonstrating that the ­occasional wrong note wasn't going to deter him from a performance of ­bristling immediacy. In fact, the splashes were more than occasional, but that hardly registered when the ­performance as a whole had such a sense of rightness and occasion, and when there were passages of such serene, silvered beauty to more than compensate for the untidy corners. Barenboim's Beethoven, warts and all, you sense, gets its priorities right. Final concert tonight. Box office: 0844 847 9934.