Prom 13: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Runnicles, Royal Albert Hall, London

Schoenberg's rapturous summer night

There can be no safety in numbers for Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. For all its vastness, for all its huge male chorus, its eight-part mixed chorus, its monster orchestra where almost all the wind comes in multiples of seven or more, it is intimacy that it strives for and can, in experienced hands, achieve. Donald Runnicles' rather wonderful performance on Sunday thought big, but projected small. Myriad refinements and tiny details were its strength. Each "song", each scene had its own fantastic music, its collective energy only really released at the last great sunrise.

By freeing Gurrelieder from the squishy generalisations that so often dog it, the overripe fruit was now just ready for picking. Still forbidden fruit, of course, but at least we knew why. Part one – the illicit love affair between Waldemar and Tove – was never in my experience so clearly delineated into a series of nine songs, nine internal monologues. Emotionally, psychologically, this is a duet, but, like Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, its protagonists are predestined to glorious isolation until death unites them.

The tenor Jon Villars (Waldemar) was clearly nursing his resources. Radio 3 audiences will have had a better share of his lieder-like "inwardness". One could sense him trying to find atmosphere in the words, but they weren't reaching us. The voice simply needed to open more. Christine Brewer (Tove), on the other hand, had the measure of the hall, happy to ride the tide of growing rapture in orchestra right through to her parting kiss on a shining top C.

Runnicles, as I say, attuned our ears to hear deep into the score: when string basses dissolved into a single bass clarinet during the Wood-Dove's "singing telegram" – the tragic news of Tove's death – our perception of the text darkened with it. Petra Lang was spectacularly good in this great monologue. You hung on to her every word; the opera of the mind became the opera of the senses. Rich vocal colour, drama, a resounding climax: "Helwig's falcon, it was, that cruelly slaughtered Gurre's dove!" The response was a mighty gasp from the BBC Symphony's massed horns.

"The Wild Hunt" was then imminent – another kind of music with massed male voices, Waldemar's vassals, a skeletal horde, raising the roof while the percussion section shakes, rattles and rolls out the chink of chain mail, the scrape and clash of rusty steel. Then the bitter "burleske" of Klaus, the Fool – Philip Langridge, well-seasoned and incisive, with Runnicles finding clarity in the rhythm of Schoenberg's brilliant scoring.

But the best was to come. As four piccolos, writ high like a heat-haze, set the orchestra humming, the veteran Swiss tenor Ernst Haefliger took centre stage to deliver the melodrama of another "wild hunt" – that of the summer wind. Sounding for all the world like a very old and very wise child, his sing-song sprech-gesang conveyed such wonder and rapture at nature's renewing force that only the heartless could fail to be moved. Put simply: life goes on. And so do the Proms. A great night.