French music from different eras in the last 150 years occupies more common ground than any of its dissimilarities might suggest.

That’s so obviously true of the line from Fauré to Henri Dutilleux via Debussy and Ravel that it needs only a concert like this one to illustrate the point.

Doing it convincingly were the massed ranks of the BBCNOW and its chorus under principal conductor Thierry Fischer, in performances of exceptional immediacy and elegance.

The mood having been suggested in Fauré's Pavane, French violinist Olivier Charlier joined the orchestra for Dutilleux's L'Arbre des Songes (Tree of Dreams), a violin concerto but not as we know it. Though dedicated to Isaac Stern, the concerto has become identified with Charlier in recent years, so it was a surprise to see him with a score, albeit as a memory aid.

He turned its pages but he evidently wasn't sight-reading. Just as well, for the thematic development, never straightforward with Dutilleux, is as much down to the soloist's innate sense of convergence with the orchestra as the orchestra's own reproduction of the ravishing sounds which meet it. The percussive interludes were particularly well done.

Ravel's music for the Diaghilev ballet Daphnis and Chloe, with the BBCNOW chorus supplying the vocalese, found Fischer and his musicians passing the penultimate test of an orchestra's ability to slip from antique grace to frenzied abandon and back again several times. The ultimate test was to locate that longing for a past impossible to restore, so typical of Ravel's music. They dealt with that pretty well, too.