Sometimes it's good, to mix metaphors, when a warhorse changes its spots. I almost didn't recognise Tchaikovsky's Pathétique symphony from Tadaaki Otaka's account with his former charges, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This was Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, tamed and smoothed after a successful course on the psychiatrist's couch.

In the first movement, brass cut into the argument brightly, without malevolence; the third movement reached clamour but never hysteria. The finale, usually most “pathétique” of all, ended doused in sorrow, not black despair.

Emotional restraint also characterised the concert's first half, devoted to things British and marine. In Sea Pictures the orchestral accompaniment was shapely and petite - Elgar in a miniature bottle. More troubling was the mezzo Christine Rice's flat bottom register and muffled projection (unusual in an opera singer). Grace Williams's Sea Sketches of 1944, meanwhile, slipped past the ear suggesting Britten without the asperity, Vaughan Williams without the yearning. Well-crafted music, yes, but not one of the Welsh composer's most fibrous works.

There was much more substance to the radiant, clear and tender late-night performance of Messiaen's wartime masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time. At the premiere in the Görlitz prison camp in 1941, Messiaen's fellow musicians were all French. Here they crossed Europe's borders: Martin Fröst (Swedish, clarinet), Anthony Marwood and Matthew Barley (British, violin and cello), the Austrian composer- pianist Thomas Larcher.

For emotional impact and musical dazzle none in this band of brothers could top Fröst in his bird-flecked solo movement, circling the gloomy abyss. But Marwood's ethereal violin soared touchingly toward eternity at the end. One flaw briefly nagged: the suave delivery of the movement that Messiaen labels as a dance of fury. An ideal late-night Prom.

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