There they were, lined up for Mahler’s most audacious work of all, the Symphony of a Thousand. Five choirs, nine soloists — and, of course, an orchestra ready for the challenge of punching through the morass of Latin invocations, mystical ruminations and titanic climaxes.

The Royal Philharmonic certainly looked sharp enough on their 60th birthday to be able to hold their end up. And there’s no doubt that under their chief conductor, Daniele Gatti, they can easily compete with their London competitors. Gatti’s certainty through the maze was evident from the opening Veni Creator: deftly commanding the choral ranks but still giving his orchestra the space to show off their dexterity. The strings boasted impeccably silvery tone; the RPO brass ripped through the mighty tutti with glee.

Who needs more? Well, Mahler did, though whether any conductor can truly thread the second part of the work — a mammoth setting of the finale of Goethe’s Faust — into the initial sunburst is debatable. Gatti’s scrupulous approach had its benefits — his ability to scale the five choirs down to a whisper was particularly impressive — but it also seemed a little light on the drama of redemption played out in the text. After the full weight of a devastating adagio, the haunting prelude to the Faust scene that arrived shot through with post-Wagnerian angst, the tension sagged and Gatti never quite seemed able to recapture it.

But then a large part of the problem had nothing to do with him. Of the soloists, only Matthew Best’s gritty bass and Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s plangent mezzo really shone. The two sopranos shouldering much of the burden, a wayward Christine Teare and a stressed-sounding Janice Watson, were way off message, while the tenor Kim Begley battled manfully against his cruelly testing verses without ever quite succeeding. Philip Joll, allotted the stirring lines of Pater Ecstaticus, didn’t do much to rouse the spirits. As for whoever’s idiotic decision it was to shroud the Albert Hall in sepulchral gloom for the entire performance — making it impossible to read the text that Mahler so painstakingly wanted us to concentrate on — well, they didn’t do this birthday party any favours.