In the period while the Royal Festival Hall was closed for refurbishment, its resident orchestras became nomads, travelling between various other halls. Some adventurous members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra even ventured out for chamber evenings at the Wigmore Hall and it is good to see that enterprise carrying on, even with the South Bank open again.

For their programme of Wagner and Mahler on Friday there was hardly space for another player on the platform: the string players were close to digging each other in the ribs and the tam-tam player for the Mahler was left playing in the doorway, adding a ghostly echo to his contribution.

Wagner wrote the Siegfried Idyll to be performed as a birthday gift to his wife Cosima on Christmas day. As the frost settled in on the coldest night of the winter, its emotional warmth provided a welcome glow, though the horn and wind instruments along the back wall overpowered the strings at the front and the pace sagged at times without a conductor to impose a sense of direction.

For Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, conductor Mark Elder joined the players, bringing an immediate gain in concentration and purpose. Schoenberg’s arrangement, which reduces Mahler’s vast orchestra to 13 players, has become popular in recent years and it is easy to see why. Very little is lost of Mahler’s original conception, which is often focused on solo instruments anyway, and the brittle delicacy of the chamber version could be said to reflect the Chinoiserie of the poems rather well.

It would be nice if the chamber version brought the songs closer to the intimacy of Lieder, but that was not how it came across here. Paul Nilon still had to sing at full throttle to make himself heard in the tenor songs, though he encompassed the tenderness for the quieter moments too. In the mezzo songs, Alice Coote’s proudly glowing voice would suit either version well and sounded splendid here.

The final “Abschied” is always the high point of a performance and this was no exception. Elder drew acutely expressive playing from the solo musicians of the London Philharmonic and gave Coote the space she needed to explore the music’s intensity without allowing the performance to wallow. As her voice soared radiantly into the closing stanza, one felt this was the music it was made to sing.