PROM 65: BBC SO / Saraste, Royal Albert Hall, London

The young Benjamin Britten was hugely impressed when he heard the first British performance of Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex in 1936. "This work," he wrote, "shows his wonderful sense of style and power in drawing inspiration from every age of music and in leaving the whole a perfect shape, satisfying every aesthetic demand." The impact was to be lasting, too, perhaps lingering as long as his late cantata Phaedra, composed for Janet Baker in the penultimate year of his life.

This setting, from Robert Lowell's English version of Racine's play, takes the form of a 15-minute baroque cantata, with continuo-like cello and harpsichord accompaniment for recitatives and lightly textured string orchestra and percussion backing for the numbers. Conceived for the intimate acoustic of the Snape Maltings, it might have seemed a risky proposition in the vast void of the Royal Albert Hall.

But this would be to reckon without the mesmeric voice of the American mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Less rhetorical and plangent than Dame Janet, but more sensuously lyrical throughout her compass, she commands a huge dynamic range, from a forceful fullness down to the merest whisper. With Jukka-Pekka Saraste drawing expressive detail from the BBC SO strings, this account of the fated heroine's last moments was the highspot of the evening.

Maybe it drained Hunt Lieberson, too; for, though still impressive, she sounded less focused in Jocasta's long scena at the centre of Oedipus Rex itself. This is, texturally, the most tricky of the four great classical projects of Stravinsky's middle years, for the rough-hewn monumentality of its wind and drum-dominated scoring can easily overwhelm its soloists. Matters were not helped by the unsettlingly hasty tempo with which Saraste pitched the stentorian men of the BBC Singers into the opening chorus. But he established a more lyrical rapport with the imposing Robert Gambill in the cruelly high tenor role of Oedipus himself, and the work's climactic return of its opening outcry hit home with due pity and fearsomeness.

In prospect, the opening item of this concert might have seemed to have nothing to do with matters mythological. One of the last works of the late Italian master Franco Donatoni, Prom for Large Orchestra comprises a typically volatile interplay of patterns and chord clusters, gruffly bounced between different sections of a large orchestra. But its abstract, implicitly "classical" manner proved it a fitting upbeat after all.