No conductor has done more to revitalise the repertoire than Charles Mackerras. He could have celebrated his 80th birthday with any number of composers and pieces he has reinvigorated over the years. He chose Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, in a thrilling concert performance with the ensemble he's worked with on his most adventurous projects through- out the past decade, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. This was vintage Mackerras, full of explosive insights and momentum, and a cast led by the outstanding Christine Brewer as Leonore.

Mackerras revealed the raw power of Beethoven's operatic ode to freedom. He shaped each act with conviction, from the prisoners' chorus in the first act to the overthrowing of tyranny at the end. There were individual moments of brilliance as well: the way Mackerras and the SCO created a vision of suffocating darkness in the prelude to Florestan's second act aria, or the archaic sequence of chords that grew into a radiant peal of joy as the prisoners walked into the sunlight and the end of the first act. Even more powerful was Mackerras's performance of the third Leonore overture, Beethoven's distillation of the opera into 15 minutes of blistering instrumental, which Mackerras inserted between the two scenes of the second act.

Brewer just gets better and better. Her first act aria was sensational, turning Beethoven's tortuous vocal lines into soaring heroism. By contrast, tenor Thomas Moser's Florestan was crippled by the demands of his second act scene, and he was never convincing dramatically as the wronged prisoner. Peter Rose was an efficient but uninvolving Rocco, while Lisa Milne's Marzelline was a magnificently complete performance, and Terje Stensvold, as the malevolent Pizarro, created a terrifying paean to revenge in his first act aria. But the evening belonged to Mackerras. He looked bemused by the standing ovation: his 80th birthday, you sense, is a reason for him to keep going rather than to rest on his laurels.