WNO’s status as a world-class opera company makes its orchestra, by extension, something special.

Appearances on the concert platform have long confirmed the belief that it can give the non-operatic repertoire as lively a workout as the music it plays in the pit.

There’s been no better example of that in recent times than the performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring given here in a concert that began lifting the curtain on the company’s summer season just over a month before the 100th anniversary of the work’s notorious first performance in Paris.

Twenty years ago there were still otherwise fearless orchestras and conductors who would customarily avoid playing it whenever they could..

If music of such eruptive force can be said to be rushed, then conductor Lothar Koenigs did light the blue touch-paper and allow the work to crackerjack away merrily as if under its own volition.

That said, it was never difficult to catch the means by which Stravinsky keeps the listener in a state of nervous expectation, and the contrast between the simple but ever-changing melodies and the savage assaults on the ear were as sharp as perhaps only an opera orchestra can make them - too sharp sometimes.

The concert opened with music from Wagner’s Parsifal, played with a hushed reverence, followed by another two merged extracts from his Twilight of the Gods - Siegfried’s funeral music and Brunnhilde’s immolation - that echoed a vastness about to implode into The Rite’s febrile intensity.

The orchestra sounded well prepared for the company’s new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin later this month.