Performances of Schoenberg's monumental cantata are no longer as rare as they used to be, but they are still major events, daunting to mount and thrilling to witness. For Sunday night's performance of Gurrelieder, Donald Runnicles conducted the combined forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, its chorus and that of the Philharmonia, together with the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and six soloists, to create an experience that did full justice to what is one of the landmarks of 20th-century music.

The composition of Gurrelieder in the early 1900s was a watershed in Schoenberg's creative development - both a farewell to the late-romantic tradition and a gateway to the revolutionary works he would produce over the following decade, yet far more than a wallowing in Wagnerian grandiosity. Its scale and musical language might have been unthinkable without the examples of The Ring, Tristan and Parsifal, but this is not music drama manqué; it is a unique work conceived for and belonging in the concert hall.

Gurrelieder is really the biggest of all song cycles. The story of the doomed love of King Waldemar for Tove is related in a series of songs and orchestral interludes, delivered first by the lovers and then by witnesses to the ensuing tragedy. It is by turns erotic, elegiac and fantastical, calling upon huge forces (a 150-piece orchestra as well as a multitude of singers) to generate a sequence of vivid, intensely dramatic episodes thematically welded together.

Runnicles, born in Scotland and now music director at the San Francisco Opera, had the measure of every facet of this teeming score - its cataclysmic climaxes and its rapturous intimacies. Jon Villars summoned all the necessary dramatic heft for the role of Waldemar, joining Christine Brewer's enraptured Tove in the first part and chillingly railing against God in the second. Petra Lang made the Wood-Dove's anguished narration of his death spell-binding; Peter Sidhom delivered the Peasant's wild-eyed testimony, and Philip Langridge Klaus the Fool's portrait of the king's impotent fury.

It has become a tradition for a distinguished retired singer to deliver the final spoken narration, and so the great Swiss tenor Ernst Haefliger, living every single word, celebrated the wonders of nature in the passage that leads to the final redemptive chorus. Absolutely tremendous.