SHE LOOKS good for her age. Better than she sounds. But as Joanna Lumley, chairperson for the Royal Festival Hall's golden jubilee celebrations so pointedly reminded us, we're all going to need some tender loving care to get through the next 50 years. Sounding (though happily not looking) alarmingly like Ab Fab's Patsy, Miss Lumley was also quick to acknowledge the advantages of royal patronage, advising us that a little word in the right ear was all it took (darlings) to avert a Tube strike and a General Election on the same day as the birthday bash.

So the party got underway. The Philharmonia Orchestra didn't come empty- handed. A specially commissioned Fanfare by Sir Harrison Birtwistle was their gift to the hall and, under the direction of Pierre-Andre Valade, up it came through the foundations of the hall like the music that time forgot - a splash of antiphonal brass from the Iron Age, all growling bass tubas and tucketing trumpets. And one significant tam-tam resonance.

The Kirov's Valery Gergiev, the evening's principal guest conductor, seemed to pick up on that as he sprinted to the platform (force of habit of an insane schedule?) and, not standing on ceremony or protocol, launched the weighty opening chord of Beethoven's Leonore No 3 Overture. Instant atmosphere. Florestan's dungeon, sunk too deep to contemplate. Near-silent pianissimi gripping us like the fingers of darkness. And heroics to match at the close. I think they call this inspir-ational conducting.

Then there was Murray Perahia, ever the poet in Schumann's Piano Concerto. Poets lean back into the music, savour the way it scans, the way the mood can turn on a phrase. Like the sudden modulation/ transformation of the leading oboe theme into a reverie for keyboard and clarinet. Or the sudden rush of anxiety into the cadenza. Performances of the Schumann ultimately lodge - or otherwise - in the memory on the basis of the deftness and ease and limpidity of those eternal spring-like figurations of the closing pages. In Perahia's hands they were the very source of songfulness.

But all good parties demand party pieces. A mostly-Verdi second half managed two singing stars out of three, a handful of protracted pay-offs, and big hair. The raven and the ashen in the case of Angela Gheorghiu and Dmitri Hvorost-ovsky. Gheorghiu, in a flame frock to match her temperament, gave us "Pace, pace, mio Dio" from La Forza del Destino and graced it with her ripe-plum sound, her melting portamenti, and exquisite on- the-breath phrasing. The climactic top B would still be ringing now had the audience not intervened.

Hvorostovsky's Rigoletto was a mistake - he has neither the weight of voice nor the years to stretch to "Cortigiani, vil razza damnata", but he managed three phrases in one breath for Rodrigo's "farewell" from Don Carlos and those of us in the audience who could hear Hvorostovsky were mighty impressed.

Less impressive was Marcello Giordani's decent but rather wooden tenor, but Miss Gheorghiu still had to sign off - how else but with the hit number from Diva (aka "Ebben?... Ne andro lontano" from La Wally) - and did so in fabulous style. Here's one musical media star with a talent to match. I'm sure Patsy, sorry, Joanna Lumley, would agree. But she was probably too busy schmoozing the Prince of Wales.

Edward Seckerson

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