The London Philharmonic and Mark Elder in the Wigmore Hall? It sounds unlikely, but it happened - and two soloists were fitted on stage as well. As for the auditorium, there was standing room only. It wasn't, of course, the entire orchestra. A select band had been chosen to play Schoenberg's chamber-musical reduction of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. And here, less is certainly more.

Schoenberg's orchestration bares not only the Mahlerian bone, but the nerve endings too. In this late, death-shadowed work, it really does show the skull beneath the skin. And the single woodwinds, piano and celesta, with only a string quartet to absorb their resonances, cast a chill white light on the emotion within the little sentimental vignettes of chinoiserie. Paul Nilon, the tenor soloist, tuned in to the febrile downbeats and downbows of the strings and the low, lurid voice of the bass clarinet in his Drinking Song of the Earth's Sorrow, tensing his voice to take the strain.

The vision of autumn, and of the young girls picking lotus flowers, found silk-screen beauty in the voice of Alice Coote. Her mezzo, exquisitely controlled through every tone and half tone, brought to the surface the veiled sensuality that is finely released in the clatter of horses' hooves. Coote never gives less than her all and, in the last, long Farewell, artfully paced by Elder, every passing image was lived in, every emotion charged. A little more cool early on would perhaps have made the final vision of spring and eternity bloom still more radiantly.

The evening had begun with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll just as his wife Cosima might have heard it when a small band of musicians played this “symphonic birthday greeting” on the staircase outside her bedroom. Siegfried's heroic horn and the sweet voice of the Woodbird sang out both tenderness and excitement in Elder's beautifully shaped performance.

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