For a work so beloved of choral societies everywhere, Haydn's Creation is surprisingly difficult to bring off. It might be a comfort to those choral society directors to know that this still applies even if you are Frans Brüggen, with the London Philharmonic at your disposal.

Not that this performance missed the mark by far. It started well, the vibratoless strings bang in tune for what was quite an orderly Representation of Chaos. From then on, Brüggen took care to bring out the vivid effects, in particular the lower, more ungainly noises with which Haydn seems to have had the most fun: the double basses, ranged on each side of the platform, trilling away perkily to portray the Leviathan; the rudely rasping contrabassoon at the mention of "heavy beasts". The second violins, seated front right, whipped up some especially stormy crosscurrents as the baritone Christopher Maltman sang Rolling in Foaming Billows.

Among the soloists there were mixed priorities. Maltman proved he has almost all the low notes for what is really a bass solo, and sang with relentless care for communication, while at the other end of the scale there was Donna Brown's small, sweet soprano, so even-toned that one longed for her to fluff a note to liven things up a bit. Timothy Robinson's clarion tenor balanced these two out, putting everything across without seeming to try too hard. He had some problems with high notes in his Part Two aria, but conquered them to sing a ravishing introduction to Part Three. As for the London Philharmonic Choir, it was on excellent form, sailing confidently through some tricky writing.

So what was missing? Perhaps the pull of real, sustained momentum: some of Brüggen's tempos seemed steady, and the gaps between movements didn't always help. This wasn't always a problem; indeed, the long ensemble for Adam and Eve and chorus in Part Three went with a swing. But still, as so often with this work, the sum of the performance remained stubbornly less than its parts.