Performances of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony are always an event. This one, the culmination of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s cycle, carried the cumulative energy of their four concerts in six days, a summation of all the great emotional and intellectual force Beethoven represents. Purists may argue the primacy of the late quartets, yet being part of a Symphony Hall audience transfixed by every breath of the music and finally erupting with joy was to be part of something altogether more hopeful. It was further evidence of conductor Andris Nelsons’ extraordinary instinct for communicating the essence of a work, examining the nuts and bolts of its construction and transcending mechanics to take the experience to a higher plane.

Plaudits first to the glorious CBSO chorus, their discipline making Beethoven’s huge demands on them appear negligible: intonation and enunciation of Schiller’s words were impeccable, and the care given to the oft-repeated word‚ “brüder” underlining the aspiration to peaceful brotherhood had its own powerfully cumulative effect. The orchestra, too, was in optimum form: details precisely honed, while also sustaining the almost Wagnerian expansiveness that Nelsons brought to the phrasing. The Eighth Symphony, a world away from the lofty ideals of the Ninth, had carried the same balance of a dancing grace with dramatically explosive bursts of rhythmic energy.

But from the quietly arresting opening, it was the organic progress of the Ninth that held the attention, with the contemplative heart of the slow adagio allowing the choral finale to emerge as a logical conclusion to everything so far. South African Vuyani Mlinde who sang the stirring bass solo, joined with soloists Annette Dasch, Lioba Braun and Ben Johnson, to push the reluctant Nelsons on for a solo bow. Nothing to do with him, he tried to suggest, only the genius of Beethoven.