Can there be a more thrilling, a more cathartic experience than the final pages of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony? As the massed choral voices and thundering organ echo to the rafters, it seems almost as if the Albert Hall was built to accommodate the mighty peroration.

It was a painstakingly won climax, however. Bernard Haitink is not a man to be hurried, and the course he plotted with the BBC Symphony Orchestra through the five-movement epic was a spacious one.

Nor is he a man of dramatic instincts. His response to the work is not to its programme - once outlined by Mahler - of the hero's "titanic struggle against life and destiny", the folklike marches and dances, the climactic grave-opening apocalypse.

Mahler may have advised younger colleagues to "study less counterpoint and read more Dostoyevsky", but Haitink is not of that persuasion: he is interested less in the angst, more in the architecture.

From the start, the structural outlines were more prominent than the "titanic struggle". Rather than plunging us into the maelstrom, Haitink's measured opening movement laid out the grand scale of what was to come. There were moments of beatific vision, glimpses of heaven, though the overriding impression was of tremendous power unleashed, with the promise of even more.

Less convincing was Haitink's deliberate plod through the country dance second movement. True, it is supposed to evoke happiness in retrospect rather than the present, but Haitink's lack of charm and geniality projected a dour, cerebral temperament.

More ponderous tempi in the Scherzo suggested little of the grotesquerie that underlies it. But finally in the fourth and fifth movements, the unhurried progress came into its own. Urlicht was fittingly rapt, with Christianne Stotijn a deeply expressive mezzo soloist. Susan Gritton was an equally impressive soprano soloist and the BBC Symphony and London Symphony Choruses raised the roof with their climactic choral affirmation.