"The joyous apocalypse" is a phrase frequently used to describe the mood of Vienna during the first half of the 20th century, when imperial collapse coincided with the birth of psychoanalysis, the last gasps of Romanticism and the first stirrings of European modernism. Gianandrea Noseda's remarkably programmed concert with the BBC Philharmonic offered us a probing analysis of this unique period in the city's history: the introspection of music by Mahler and Berg, both central to Vienna's cultural life, was placed alongside works by Ravel and Richard Strauss, a pair of fascinated outsiders, who took the Viennese waltz itself as a metaphor for terminal decline.

Not all of it worked. Noseda's choice of an anonymously prepared suite from Der Rosenkavalier, as opposed to one of Strauss's own concert arrangements, was slightly suspect - the erotic fury of his conducting failed to disguise the slipshod nature of the compilation. Berg's Violin Concerto - triggered by the death, from polio, of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler's daughter by her second husband Walter Gropius - heaved with a tremulous sensuality that tellingly turned Manon into a potential counterpart of Berg's own Lulu. But the soloist, Akiko Suwanai, though sweet toned and technically formidable, seemed uncomfortable with the work's emotional and dramatic extremes.

The second half of the concert, however, was staggering. The adagio from Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony was unremitting in both its structural logic and its disquieting psychoanalytic intimacy - Mahler was a patient of Freud at the time of composition. You ended up wanting to hear Noseda conduct one of the symphony's posthumous completions in its entirety. The closing work was Ravel's La Valse, deceptively alluring in its glitter and ferocious in its sense of dissolution as the waltz spins out of control, bringing rhythm and melody to a point of total annihilation.