This BBC Symphony Orchestra programme under the Catalan conductor Josep Pons brought together two great Italian composers of different centuries, simultaneously in one item: Luciano Berio's arrangement of eight songs by Verdi. The result represents a curious stylistic amalgam.

Berio sticks to the forces Verdi would have had at his disposal in a mid-19th-century opera pit, and leaves the vocal line – here vividly sung by tenor Atalla Ayan – as originally written. But now and again he throws in quirky harmonic alterations or suddenly interpolates out-of-period orchestral gestures; introductions and postludes, too, are added or rewritten – the ending of To a Star, for instance, is extended as a freewheeling emotional dissolve. Such gambits intrigue, with the incorporation of a quotation from Wagner's Lohengrin at the beginning of The Exile a particularly distinctive – if slightly naughty – touch. Pons proved a considerate accompanist.

Berio's fascination with intertextuality was at its best in Pons's dynamic account of his Sinfonia – a work that achieved instant classic status at its 1968 New York premiere. Its palimpsest-like reworking of the scherzo from Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, with quotations bursting out of the phantasmagorical texture, registered strikingly, while the spoken texts (by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Samuel Beckett and others) filtered in by members of Synergy Vocals added to the score's surrealism.

Pons's ability to instil motivation into his performers was confirmed in Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces. Two of them – the Stabat Mater and the Te Deum, to which soprano Sarah-Jane Brandon added an extra touch of luminosity with her tiny solo – are grandly reinforced even if their general expressive mode is refined and elliptical. Throughout, the BBC Symphony Chorus attacked Verdi's exposed and demanding writing with unimpeachable boldness.

On BBC iPlayer until 15 December.

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