As a grand finale, nothing can beat Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts, and setting it in Tewkesbury Abbey for the closing concert of this year's Cheltenham festival was inspired. Tewkesbury's austere Norman grandeur can accommodate and offset the requiem's gorgeous excesses. Berlioz's massive score usually makes performance prohibitive but, by marshalling the area's bedrock amateur forces, artistic director Martyn Brabbins turned negatives into a major plus here.

Berlioz, who was susceptible to the frissons of high drama, wanted his music to have a similar impact on the audience. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Dies Irae of the Grande Messe and its glorious explosion of brass and timpani at the words Tuba Mirum. With brass choirs - members of the Portishead Town Band - set at the four points of the compass, the reverberation through the nave was awesome. Wrap-around sound never came more all-enveloping than this.

While part of the requiem's force lies in the contrast between the quiet solemnity of the counterpoint and the bombastic climaxes, the disparity between the two can be too extreme, but Brabbins' careful handling of the crescendi ensured an overall integrity. His tempi were equally careful, getting round the abbey's acoustic tricks and allowing the chromatic harmonies of the a cappella Quaerens Me to be heard. And, even if sometimes imperfectly realised, Berlioz's instrumental colour was always striking: flutes and trombones combined in the Hostias, the mysterious cymbal shimmering against the tenor solo from Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts in the Sanctus. The massed voices of the Cheltenham, Gloucester, Stroud and Tewkesbury choirs and the St Cecilia Singers sang with conviction so that, by the Agnus Dei, Berlioz's vision of heaven was almost more persuasive than his loud and fiery hell. On a hot summer's night, that was quite an achievement.