The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the late 19th century are strange bedfellows. They're more used to playing the classical repertoire of the 18th century, yet they began their series of concerts inspired by Parisian concert life with a work written on the cusp of the 20th century, Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande suite.

Conducted by Marc Minkowski, the players made this haunting, delicate work sound strikingly modern, finding hidden depths of colour with the softness of their string sound and piquant woodwinds. The mechanical repetitions of La Fileuse, Fauré's depiction of Mélisande at her spinning wheel, looked forward to the fairytales of Ravel's music, and Lisa Beznosiuk's flute solo in the Sicilienne, cast an eerie, shimmering spell.

For all Fauré's refined expressionism, it was music written more than half a century earlier, Berlioz's song-cycle Les Nuits d'Eté, that was the most forward-looking music on the programme. Mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter gave a mesmerising performance, creating a miniature drama of death-haunted imagery in the six songs, from the primavernal joy of the opening Villanelle to the aching loneliness of the fourth song, Absence. But it was the sheer brilliance of Berlioz's orchestral imagination that came across most strongly, the way his settings create indelible musical images for Théophile Gautier's poems, conjuring their voluptuous world of doomed love in a tiny phrase, a single gesture. The rocking melody in the cellos at the end of the third song, On the Lagoons, was a matchless evocation of existential isolation; a fleeting solo violin harmonic in At the Cemetery realised the shadowy, angelic presence of the poem. Even more affecting was Absence, with Von Otter's repeated refrain, "Return, return, my sweetest love!", set to some of Berlioz's most daringly static music.

Minkowski was a subtle accompanist, but after the interval, he was a man possessed in Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, an interpretation that trod a knife-edge between energy and eccentricity.