I think this might have been my 25th First Night of the Proms as a critic. Undoubtedly it was the weirdest. It was like eating a huge bowl of muesli without milk: lots of nuggety bits and pieces, some of which were probably “good for you”, and some stuffed in as fillers — but all impossible to swallow without liquid. Only a stern sense of duty inhibited me from downing the three or four lagers that might have made the evening more palatable.

There are two proven ways to make a First Night go with a wallop. One is to summon every educated pair of lungs in London to hurl out some gargantuan choral blockbuster. The other is to hire a world-class superstar whose charisma will guarantee a tumultuous reception. Nigel Kennedy might have done the trick. Unfortunately, he’s appearing at the Proms tonight — 24 hours too late.

Instead, we were given a kind of “taste it and see” preview of the composers whose birth centenaries are featured this season (the grittily modernist Elliott Carter and the quixotically mystical Olivier Messiaen), stuffed between a disparate array of showpieces for organ, oboe, piano and soprano, and rounded off by Scriabin’s spine-shuddering Poem of Ecstasy, presumably chosen because it was written in the year that Carter and Messiaen were born.

Times Archive, 1941: Promenade Concerts

The Proms begin at the Albert Hall tomorrow and all the announcements show a determination to make them as like as possible to those we have known at Queen's Hall

• 1924: The Promenade Concerts

Related Links

• The Times Proms Podcast: episode one

It was lucky that the poem was ecstatic, because I could detect few in the audience who were. To me it seemed that this odd compendium of mostly unrelated short pieces was designed more to hold the presumed gnat-sized attention-span of the BBC Two audience than to launch the world’s greatest classical-music festival in suitably memorable style.

Still, some things will stay in my memory — though perhaps not for the next 25 years. Every light in South Kensington must have flickered as the exuberant Wayne Marshall put the Albert Hall organ through its monster-raving-loony paces in Messiaen’s Dieu parmi nous. The soprano Christine Brewer, almost as mighty a sight as the organ, sang Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs with surprising tenderness and glinting top notes. Nicholas Daniel was puckishness personified in Mozart’s Oboe Concerto. Not everything he tried came off. But respect to him for being so audacious on live telly.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave a dazzling first British performance to Carter’s Caténaires for solo piano — written, like one of Bach’s mercurial inventions, for a perpetual-motion whirl of semiquavers whizzing round the ivories like a demented bee trapped in a bottle. And finally the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek waded through Scriabin’s lusciously bloated textures and lurid chromatics with admirable diligence. I don’t think I was the only one with a severe case of lug’ole fatigue by then.

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