Pierre Boulez's Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna was written on the death of a close friend but it doesn't emote. Instead, it sounds how a modernist painting of a funeral march might look.

The orchestra is divided into eight sections and the music, beginning sombrely on the oboe, is passed from section to section at the sound of a gong.

Throughout, there are two beats played on a variety of percussion instruments, followed by another two beats slightly out of sync, as if to suggest clocks winding down.

It ends quietly, but suddenly, almost mid-sentence.

The Orchestre National de Lille, under Daniel Kawka, brought this elemental music spine-tinglingly to life, proving that the one-time enfant terrible of the avant garde is not so hard to listen to now he has turned 80.

If only the same could be said of Olli Mustonen's overwrought performance of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.

His histrionic gestures at the keyboard, the hands flying up and flapping tremulously in the air, the mopping of his fevered brow with his sleeve, the swaying of his body as if he was in an enraptured trance, mirrored the treacle with which he embalmed this masterpiece.

This was how you would imagine The Simpsons might satirise a concert pianist.

When I should have been listening to the music I was worrying, with all that brow-mopping, about Olli's dry-cleaning bill. Horrible.

After that, Kawka and the Lille players redeemed the evening with Debussy's La Mer which, while insecure in the brass at the start, turned into a thrilling portrait of the grey waters down the road.