Prom 30: National Youth Orchestra/Rattle

It's always an event, always an occasion, but the build-up to this performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony – the so-called Symphony of a Thousand (not Mahler's description, incidentally) – was especially titillating. This is a relatively new work for Sir Simon Rattle (only his second performance of the piece); he was once himself a member of the orchestra he was conducting; and he had choirs from three continents at his bidding.

The queues had formed for Prom 30 from six o'clock in the morning, and many of the hopefuls were turned away come the hour. And when the hour came, the tension inside the Royal Albert Hall was palpable as first the choirs and then the swelled ranks of the National Youth Orchestra filed to their places with military precision. It took a while; long enough to contemplate the noise they might make come the moment.

And then the moment came. An E-flat chord on the organ and the mighty choral invocation "Veni creator spiritus" – "Come creator spirit" – was hurled at us with a force that seemed directly proportionate to all the anticipation. The first big surprise was the thrust, the impetus of those opening bars, Rattle establishing right there and then that this was to be a true symphonic allegro, not some oratorial purge. He gave himself plenty of room for those big Mahlerian contrasts.

The sheer fantasy of the contrasting second episode introducing the solo voices was achieved by gently nursing the vocal counterpoint, allowing it truly to permeate the atmosphere. Rattle, one felt, wasn't fighting the hall's roominess but rather making capital of it. The soft music didn't just sit there in anticipation of the next climax; a solo flute over transparent violins filled the space as surely as the great double-fugue at the heart of the movement.

That was tremendous: a big, blockbusting, onward-Christian-crusaders march in which Rattle had his children's choirs cup their hands to direct their raucous voices through the mêlée. The intensity of the vocal counterpoint was achieved through rhythm and precision and the courage of being able to steer this great juggernaut at speeds faster than the handbook recommends.

Rattle is one hell of a driver. And when you are this good you can afford to be a bit of a daredevil. The headlong rush of the coda – "Gloria Patri Domino" – with its delirious choral entries going off like volleys of sky-rockets, was as unanimous as it was hair-raising.

The massed choirs from London, Birmingham, Toronto and Sydney gave Rattle so much more than just volume and unanimity. He asked for, and got, many subtle variations in word-colour and rhythm, in particular from the ladies, whose angelic hosts in part two of the piece trod air so playfully and capriciously.

It is that naive, child-like quality that this setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust must convey. Its more calorifically challenged passages, such as the entry of the Mater Gloriosa, the Queen of Heaven, are not for fudging. Floating on a purple haze of harmonium, the violins of the NYO gave us rapt portamento poised with a maturity well beyond their years. Never mind that the tonal bloom was not always there; the spirit and intensity were.

So, as the excellent tenor Jon Villars implored us to lift our eyes "to the redeeming gaze" of the "eternal-feminine" mother of love, and the sopranos Christine Brewer and Soile Isokoski interwove ecstatically way above the stave, the "Chorus Mysticus" swelled. It was a pity that Rattle chose not to maximise the separation of his extra brass choir by placing them at the back of the hall, but as his trumpets stretched the octave to an outreaching ninth, I think it's safe to say we got the message.

This Prom will be rebroadcast on Radio 3 on Friday at 2pm