Lucerne's finest hit dazzling heights

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Abbado is indeed not a maestro in the sense of the fearsome autocrats who used to rule the musical world. His music-making is a collaborative affair and last night's stupendous performance of Mahler's Third Symphony demonstrated the advantages of such a process. Mahler Three is a work that tackles the big themes of nature and humanity, life and death, and Abbado, particularly after his recent brush with mortality (he successfully battled stomach cancer), brings an extraordinary depth of perspective to the symphony.

With players of this calibre you can attempt things mortal orchestras cannot. A jaunty march in the first movement, for example, was delivered in a hushed sotto voce (as marked in the score), adding a frisson of the macabre to this militarystyle passage. Elsewhere nature in all its rawness alternated with exquisitely voiced solos by the virtuoso first trumpet, Reinhold Friedrich.

The barely credible precision of the first movement was then deployed to delicate effect to depict the flowers of the garden. The sweet nostalgia of the third movement gave way to the fathomless depths of the mysteries of the world, with the fine mezzo soloist Anna Larsson adding her saturnine Nietzschean meditation.

The stillness of the grave was shattered by the childlike bell imitations of the fifth movement, with the Trinity Boys' Choir and the ladies of the London Symphony Chorus in good voice.

Completing the arc traced in so masterly a fashion throughout, Abbado led straight into an intensely elegiac finale. The translucent textures and glowing radiance here evoked Wagner's Parsifal and the combination of warm tenderness and spiritual certainty was overwhelming. Another great Proms event. This is turning out to be a vintage season.

Information: www.bbc.co.uk/proms; 020 7589 8212.

BBC Proms: Trinity Boys' Choir, London Symphony Chorus (Women's Voices), Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Abbado
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP