Wagner's operas seem so rooted in north European mythologies that most people forget that one of his aims was to re-create the spirit of Greek tragedy. This concert performance of Lohengrin did, however, achieve a sense of both the ritual and the deadly inexorability of classical drama.

This was partly due to Donald Runnicles's conducting, and partly thanks to his decision to deploy both the Edinburgh Festival and Philharmonia choruses to form a choir of nearly 200. The end result consisted of a series of terse dialogues, punctuated by monumental, hieratic choruses, as Runnicles slowly ratcheted up the tension, welding the score's disparate elements into a whole. For once, nothing seemed out of place in an opera that can swerve between longueurs and overblown grandeur. The BBC Scottish Symphony played with precise clarity rather than self-conscious Romantic opulence.

The cast, though variable, probed the work's psychological ambiguities with great subtlety. Hillevi Martinpelto was a very mystico-erotic Elsa, so that you were never quite sure whether Torsten Kerl's Lohengrin had appeared in answer to her prayers, or been summoned by more ambivalent forces in her sexual imagination. Kerl, beefily handsome, has a lyrical, ethereal voice, more suited to Mozart than Wagner, and was showing signs of strain by the end.

Pitted against them were Jukka Rasilainen's Telramund and Petra Lang's Ortrud. Rasilainen, weasel-like in appearance, avoided portraying Telramund as a stereotypical baddie, turning him into an unusually complex figure, at once violent and cowardly. Some might consider Lang's voice too beautiful for Ortrud, though she seduced both Rasilainen and - more tellingly - Martinpelto with an insidious display of voluptuous tone before letting rip at both of them with thrilling ferocity - a superb performance that confirms her status as one of the finest Wagner singers of our time.