Hough, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, Royal Festival Hall

Conductor Ivan Fischer had shuffled his Budapest Festival Orchestra as if a pack of cards and distributed them seemingly chaotically across the stage. The principal bassoon was with the first violins. First flute led the cellos. Horns, principal clarinet and violas commingled in the middle. And the second violins bore the oboes. But where was the second flute? And the second bassoonist? Who knew?

The results were anything but chaotic. That famous skipping melody in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony now found itself in physical as well as melodic proximity with musical friends and frolicked with even more gaiety as it was passed around from one wedge of the orchestra to the other. Was there a political message in this somewhere? Possibly.

There was certainly a political and economic message in the sapling that had been plonked in front of the conductor's stand. It was a much more moving statement, musically speaking, than I ever thought it could be. So elemental are the musical cells in the Pastoral that divide and repeat and grow through the first movement like a repairing strand of DNA that the presence of a young tree (despite the hazards: the odd confrontation with the conductor's baton) was a thoughtful touch.

Fischer's interpretation seemed to be taking its cue from Berlioz's description of the symphony as "thousands upon thousands of soft reflections of sound and light". It was all about colour and texture and an open-air freshness, about forceful gusts (the thunderstorm fell upon us with piercing timpani sticks) and cooling eddies, about wetness and dryness. Rarely have I heard an orchestra calibrated so carefully.

And though it appeared in the second movement that we were under an attack of buzzing midges, our sojourn by the watery bank was still very balmy. The single spanning final movement saw the orchestra and conductor show off all their skills as they stomped jauntily through a rustic Hungarian dance, chronicled the storm in fine atmospheric and rumbly detail and sang us to safety and into the sun.

Despite a more conventional orchestral formation, the first half was no less fresh. Haydn may have been working at the dawn of the symphonic form but his inventiveness still has the power to blow you away. His Symphony No 92 in G major, Oxford, had many moments of wonder: an extraordinary soft, dreamy introduction, edgy string work and syncopated rhythms to catch even the modern ear out.

But most fascinating for me were the silences. I can't think of another composer until the 20th century who deploys and enjoys silence as Haydn did. It would be perverse to say that the rest was the star of the show - so much of beauty was coming from Fischer's grainy but brilliantly translucent reading of this work - but certainly those gaping holes, like Mondrian's blocks of white, intensified everything around them.

Silence was pretty absent in Liszt's mad First Concerto that heralded the start of the Liszt bicentenary in suitably spectacular fashion. This is a world of cacophony and demonic ferocity, as evidenced from the off, pianist Stephen Hough having to catapult his hands up and down the piano like a man attempting to break free of his eight-octave straitjacket.

The temptation would be to tame and neuter the technical challenges. Hough avoided this glib pitfall at every turn. Awesome as it was to see him dispatch the hurdles so heroically, the thrill in this performance was hearing the concerto being delivered as Grand Guignol. And few could elicit the colours or deploy the agogic tension necessary to pour those extraordinary liquid melodies into their moulds or to evoke the silent movie-like melodramas better than Hough.

The dry percussiveness of the leaping stabs, the Schumann-esque darkness to some of the early rhapsodising, the watery lullaby-fantasia bled beautifully by Hough's pedalling, the galloping heroism to the dotted motif in the Allegro marziale, the teeth-jangling triangle heralding some not completely benign victory, were all cast in the most dramatic way possible. Wagner may have perfected the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk but Liszt's First Piano Concerto showed another more purely musical way to a unity of spectacle, narrative and sound.

It was a great way to start our re-examination of Liszt. It was fascinating to hear how much Wagner there is in early Liszt - and how much Liszt there is in late Wagner - and to what extent Liszt was a linchpin between the musical currents in the mid-19th century, between conventional Grand Opera and the Romantic radicals.

We got two quirky encores after the Beethoven back in Where's Wally formation: Brahms's Hungarian Dance No 21 and Strauss's Peasant Polka. And just as the players began to "tra-la-la" as instructed in the polka, I found the second flute tucked away at the back of the first violins and spotted the second bassoonist burbling with the percussion.