THE PROMS / A couple to catch the eye: Meredith Oakes on a Wagner-Messiaen double-bill

EROTIC abandon is not something one automatically associates with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but on Friday night they put that right. The Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan, followed by Messiaen's Turangalila - made an eye-catching couple. Wagner's anguished orgasms and Messiaen's childishly blissful lovers' union (which he wrote as a mystical response to the Tristan legend) offered a provocative contrast.

Turangalila may be standard fare for an orchestra that plays so much new music so well, but Wagner's famous score was a bold choice when so many in the audience were bound to have arrived with an ideal performance in their heads.

The Royal Albert Hall acoustic held the sound at a distance in a work where it particularly needs to be close and immediate. But Mark Wigglesworth's energy made that barrier unimportant. For the most part, the players surpassed themselves in sensitive cueing, and it was only because the whole was so beautifully placed that a few small unevennesses could be heard.

The soloist, Dame Gwyneth Jones, sang with an unexpected cleanness of tone. There were lovely narrow notes at the beginning and at the close: in the central outpourings she eventually found herself forced to sacrifice her fastidiousness and open up swoopingly.

After Wagner, Messiaen seemed even more sanitised than usual. The artful quaintness of his vastly orchestrated, repetitive Morris dancing is exasperating. Yet it was worth it when, with all the sense tromboned out of us, we emerged into the sixth movement, 'Garden of the Sleep of Love', one of the most angelically tender pieces of music ever written, with its murmuring muted strings and its dying one-note piano echoes.

Wigglesworth approached Turangalila with relish. Although Messiaen seems to have encouraged performers to strive for impersonality, his music actually gains from an uninhibited release of the performers' characters. The writing is impersonal because the themes are too rhythmically mechanical to reveal much. Players can safely go for the maximum tactile impact, as they did here. This Turangalila was a puffing, clanging, whistling Metropolis-style fantasy. Two glittering women - Joanna MacGregor, the pianist, and Cynthia Millar playing the ondes martenot - crowned the ritual. Endless applause.