The evening started on a deeply sad note. It fell to the Proms director Roger Wright to inform the Albert Hall audience of the death of the conductor Vernon Handley, who would have led Nigel Kennedy’s Elgar performance on the second night of the season but for illness. There were many strings to Handley’s bow, but championing the music of Vaughan Williams was probably his finest achievement.

Perhaps a pity, then, that RVW wasn’t saluted with a performance of greater imagination than Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra mustered for the Sinfonia antartica, the composer’s symphonic exploration of the film music he had already written for Scott of the Antarctic.

True, it’s a rather unsympathetic piece. It doesn’t have the cogency of RVW’s best symphonies; you rarely sense that the composer totally integrated the lure of the symphonic drive with the looser, more painterly approach with which he had tackled the film score. Yet Brabbins surely could have mustered more of the alien chill of the ice, and made more compelling the struggle between the elements and Man’s desire to conquer them.

Perhaps he was simply looking ahead to a long concert’s parting shot: Holst’s Planets suite, predictably but colourfully delivered as a splashy showpiece, with characterful and vibrant playing. The ethereal singing of the women of the Holst Singers were a magical bonus at the close of Neptune.

Yet the evening’s biggest thrill was actually the piece that sent many of the Planets fans scurrying for the aisles: that shimmering, throbbing, sometimes excruciating percussion epic for six instrumentalists, Xenakis’s Pleiades.

Full marks to the programmers for hoodwinking us into believing that this was a piece in astronomical sync with the Holst: in fact, its rhythmic collisions and metallic attacks form a radically different sound-world altogether. Yet the sextet of O Duo and 4-Mality played it with bracing rigour and warm enthusiasm. By the final (and best) section, the timpani-led Peaux, they had done more than enough to show the naysayers just what fun this piece can actually be.

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