One of the most outrageous and least well-known pieces to be heard at the Albert Hall this summer has come, somewhat unexpectedly, from the pen of Charles Villiers Stanford. The Ulster Orchestra presented the first Proms performance of his Piano Concerto No 2.

Stanford's work is a far cry from his Songs of the Sea and his renowned Anglican canticles. In fact, for the first ten minutes at least, the innocent ear might well think it was listening to Rachmaninov. And no wonder: Stanford had conducted the Russian composer's Piano Concerto No 2 in 1910, with Rachmaninov himself as soloist. Fired by its brooding lyricism, he had set to work immediately on a concerto of his own.

The young Dublin-born pianist Finghin Collins gave a performance of his compatriot's concerto that released the intense white heat of its inspiration. In the first, almost ludicrously Rachmaninovian, movement, Collins's crystalline accompanying figures and octaves had just the measure of Stanford's recreative homage: both panache and poetry sang out. The harp of Erin seemed to be sounding in the slow movement, and the finale was boisterous with a distinctively Irish brogue. Could this be the start of an overdue rehabilitation of this fascinatingly bilingual work?

Stanford's concerto had been heralded by the work of another Irishman, the Belfast-born Howard Ferguson. And this was another Proms first: his Overture for an Occasion (that occasion being the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II) was a dapper period piece, its polite pageantry recreated with delight by the Ulster Orchestra's principal conductor Kenneth Montgomery.

It was Stanford who had encouraged Dvorák to come to Cambridge to receive his doctorate in 1891: cue for a Czech second half - though, alas, with all too few Bohemian inflections. The orchestra played both Smetana's Vltava and Dvorák's Eighth Symphony with a will, and with a generalised bucolic folksiness, rather than with the rhythmic lilt, tug and tension of their native musical language.

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