Stravinsky in Cyberspace

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His dancer, the agile, willowy Julia Mach, disports herself in a specially constructed black space to the side of the stage. Her movements are projected by stereo cameras and a sophisticated computer system onto a giant central screen.

The three-dimensional area created, with the aid of spectacles handed out to each member of the audience, is a virtual reality space, allowing the most extraordinary interplay between reality and fantasy, between the corporeal dancer and various disembodied simulacra.

So realistic is the effect of the magic glasses that the stage seems to stretch out right from the screen to a point inches from our nose. In Spring Rounds, an elongated image of the dancer, arms outstretched in supplication, crawled closer and closer until you felt that if you reached out, you could touch her.

In the following Ritual of the Rival Tribes, the floor gyrated like an oversprung trampoline, catapulting the dancer - whose "real" body was barely moving - in a gymnastic frenzy that perfectly matched the heavy accents and rapid changes of metre.

To replicate the convulsions of the Dance of the Earth, Obermaier and his team (Ars Electronica Futurelab) fragmented the projected forms to resemble asteroids hurtling in space. That cosmic imagery was picked up in Part 2 with first particles floating in the air like the Milky Way, then multiple holograms of the dancer spinning through space.

Marin Alsop brought a tender, lyrical touch to this sequence, while elsewhere she galvanised the LPO into suitably feverish spasms whose clarity of articulation was palpably though not ruinously compromised by the amount of fabric in evidence.

Varèse's Arcana in the first half, with its Stravinskian references, had been similarly visceral: a stark contrast to the tedious insipidities of Glass's Prelude from Akhnaten.

This benchmark-setting re-creation of the Rite of Spring is repeated tonight, but it's returns only.

Information: 0871 663 2583.

Klaus Obermaier/London Philharmonic Orchestra/Alsop: Rites
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
The South Bank Centre,Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX