The devil really does have all the best tunes, certainly in Hector Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust.

Brighton Festival Chorus (BFC) assembled some great forces for this last big classical event of the 2004 festival and provided a roller coaster of a dramatic oratorio which threatened the very roof of the newly-refurbished Dome.

Not only its own beautifully controlled voices, around 150 of them, but the full National Orchestra of Lorraine with four harps, a percussion team of six, six double basses and more flutes, bassoons and brass than you can count.

Add to that four delightful singers and put Jacques Mercier in charge and you have one of the most exciting, thrilling and enjoyable nights I have ever spent in the concert hall.

After I saw L'Orfeo last weekend, I doubted I would hear better singing - but I have now.

The BFC and the Brighton Festival Youth Choir are on top form, though doubtless they will surprise me again soon by getting even better.

The men made a marvellous choir of demons and were superb as drunken soldiers and students. The ladies made delicious angels.

And in this tale of Mephistophelean manipulation, which gets Faust to sign away his soul, you can easily understand why he did it.

As well as Bonaventura Bottone's singing about his love for Marguerite, which was terrific, once you saw her every male in the audience must have reached for a pen to sign their souls away.

Gloriously sung by mezzo-soprano Nora Gubish who has a fine and heartmeltingly sharp edge to her voice, she stood there dressed in a black gown, with long auburn-ish curls and had all the curves in exactly the right place.

Am I in love with her? You bet!

But if my heart was aflutter, from interval comments more than one female heart was also aflutter with the late replacement Mephistopholes, Paul Whelan, replacing Matthew Best who was unwell.

Tall, he seems to have to stoop even inside the Dome auditorium, and powerful his bass voice was both resonant and hauntingly beautiful. He made a great, great Devil.

And the Orchestre National de Lorraine rose to it all, to them the complexities of the score seemed as nothing. It may be maestro Mercier's new orchestra but, my goodness, he can get the beggars to play.