Prom 57: Orchestre de Paris/Eschenbach, Royal Albert Hall, London

This was a programme of Last Things: literally so in the case of Luciano Berio's 30-minute Stanze for baritone, men's chorus and large orchestra which he completed only a fortnight before his death last year. And figuratively in Mahler's song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde, since, although he went on to compose his Ninth Symphony and sketch his Tenth before his death in 1911, the final song remains one of the greatest farewells in Western music. In putting them together, the visiting Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach got a less than packed Proms audience, but delivered a profoundly affecting experience.

Berio's mortal rite of passage comprises five settings, each in its own orchestral acoustic or stanza (room), which also to some extent recapitulate various stages of his own musical evolution. So the opening setting of Celan's "Tenebrae" revisits the flaring clusters and densities of his early avant-garde period in the 1950s. The second setting of lines by Giorgio Caproni evoking a traveller getting off a stopping train, and the fourth setting of Alfred Brendel's surreal evocation of life as a God-haunted polka, summon up Berio's middle period of musical onomatopoeia and polystylistic fun and games.

The central setting, of Sanguineti's apocalyptic "...ho parlato da un turbine" ("I spoke from a whirlwind") is the most operatic; a kind of jagged recitative. But in the sere, infinitely sad final setting of lines evoking the dead by Dan Pagis, Berio seems to have come through to an ultimate, if questioning, simplicity. The choral-orchestral sound, with the men of London Voices interpersed among the players, had a similarly grave, indirect, ambiguous quality.

Andreas Schmidt's restrained eloquence in the solo writing suggested all the more that this will stand as one of the great modern requiems.

Like Berio, Mahler died before he had a chance to hear Das Lied von der Erde. Had he done so, he might have modified the orchestration of its opening song, which only the most heroic of tenors could surmount. It certainly defeated the American Anthony Dean Griffey, whose fluttery, lyric style better suited the chinoiserie of the third and fifth songs. But this performance belonged to the Swiss mezzo-soprano Yvonne Naef - and to Eschenbach.

Finely focused of tone and mesmerically composed of presence, Naef delivered the most poignant evocation of the autumn loneliness of the second song and lacked only the last degree of passion in the farewell finale to crown an exemplary performance. The rapport that Eschenbach has evidently achieved with the Orchestre de Paris was instanced over and over in a spontaneous unanimity phrasing that can only be achieved by the most genuinely musical conductors.