The Southbank Centre's latest affectation seems to be an exercise in sensory deprivation, plunging the Queen Elizabeth Hall into stygian darkness during and between performances, in the deluded belief that musical understanding is enhanced if the audience cannot read anything about what they are hearing during a concert. The London Sinfonietta did it in a half-baked way in their all-Grisey programme two weeks ago, and here the Britten Sinfonia was at it as well, though they at least had the excuse that their concert was called Night Music. What made this so involving, however, was the intelligence of the programming, and the care and efficiency with which it was performed, rather than the fact that it took place in a crepuscular gloom for which two "staging consultants" were credited, one of them the director Katie Mitchell - classy gloom, indeed.

Each half had its own logic. The first traced an arc that began with Stravinsky's spiky Fanfare for a New Theatre and went straight into Birtwistle's rarely heard and rather Stravinskyan Prologue, a 1971 setting of lines from Aeschylus's Agamemnon for tenor and seven instruments. Then came Britten's Dowland reflections Lachrymae, in the string-orchestra version that was his last completed composition, and, finally, two tenor arias from Handel's Samson. After the interval, more Britten (his Nocturne) was prefaced by another string paraphrase, John Woolrich's achingly expressive Ulysses Awakes, based on the hero's great aria at the beginning of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse.

The two soloists were exemplary. Maxim Rysanov was the self-effacing, intensely poetic viola player in the Lachrymae and the Woolrich, while Mark Padmore sang Birtwistle, Handel and Britten with equal assurance, unswerving musicality and fabulously clear enunciation, which was just as well in the circumstances.

• To be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday