At its best, opera in theatre achieves a wild delirium that concert performances tend to domesticate. But if one opera can survive in concert, it's Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Notmuch happens: a husband shows his bride around their new home; she persuades him to let her open a few doors; light streams in.

Yet it is one of the most probing examinations of human relationships in all opera, not least because the orchestra embodies so much of the "action". As we are reminded in the spoken prologue (delivered in eerily offhand Hungarian by Mátyás Sárközi), the drama is more internal than external.

Under Christoph von Dohnányi, the Philharmonia Orchestra's performance balanced exquisitely between sheer instrumental weight and cleanly etched detail: the fluttering of a single flute as Judith opened the fourth door had the same presence as the mighty organ that thundered as she opened the fifth. But there was a price to pay for hearing the orchestra so well: at times the two characters were overwhelmed.

In part that was Bartók's point: the orchestra imprisons both Bluebeard and Judith -and there can be no escape. Still, Falk Struckmann and Charlotte Hellekant (neither a native Hungarian speaker) were impressive, Struckmann's Bluebeard unyielding, Hellekant's Judith melancholy and at times wild.

Her scream as the fifth door opened was truly frightening. If Struckmann sounded detached, perhaps that was in character; in contrast, Hellekant threatened at every moment to break through the chilly decorum of the concert platform.

Earlier, Dohnányi and his players had a thorough workout in Thomas Adčs's recent fantasy on the Overture, Waltz and Finale from his opera Powder her Face, written in 1995. Wisely, Adčs had not toned down his younger brashness, making it, if anything, still more exuberant, the lurching rhythms even more intoxicated. This music of an engaging show-off has lost none of its charm.

Webern's arrangement of Bach's Ricercar from A Musical Offering was far more sober. Webern doesn't dance like Bach but Dohnányi's performance had a bracing airiness.