This was Gianandrea Noseda's last concert as the BBC Philharmonic's chief conductor – he returns as conductor laureate later this year – and, as so often in his closing season, his programme combined the retrospective with the new.

Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was a reminder of the 2005 cycle that many people ranked among the finest of the last decade. Liszt's Dante symphony, meanwhile, is a work that he and the BBCPO made their own in Manchester earlier this year. The novelty was Saint-Saëns's Fifth Piano Concerto, "the Egyptian", which draws some of its thematic material from songs heard during a trip down the Nile.

The Beethoven was taut, lean and superbly detailed, in the emotionally ambiguous adagio and the scampering finale above all. Yet by Noseda's own exacting standards, it was also just occasionally reined in, not quite reaching the requisite outer limits of excitement. There were no such problems, however, with Saint-Saëns's exotic concerto. Stephen Hough – doing extraordinary things with the Orientalist flourishes of the slow movement and the thrill-a-minute finale – was the soloist in a dazzling performance of a work that teeters on the edge of camp without quite tipping into it.

The Liszt, though, was the evening's high point, despite a peripheral slip in coordination at the moment when the women's chorus, high in the building, offers us our first intimations of the music of paradise at the close of the Purgatorio. It's a spellbinding score in which Liszt balances out his lifelong impulses towards religion and sensuality. Noseda was simply sensational, whether unleashing hellish storms, savouring the love scene between Paolo and Francesca, or exploring the sufferings and raptures of the souls in purgatory. Outstanding.