If nothing else, the Orchestre de Paris wins the Best-Dressed Musicians at the Proms award. They looked wonderfully chic in their natty tunics. I wish my colleagues on the fashion desk had been there to give you a more expert description. But their playing? “Reasonable youth orchestra standard,” said a friend, and that was fair. Plenty of enthusiasm - but oh dear! What happened to the brass at the end of Mahler's First Symphony, when note after note was split or absent? Or the woodwind tuning in the exposed solos opening the symphony? Or the notion that notes written vertically on a score ought to be played together?

It was the raggedness that startled me, because advance word had suggested that Christoph Eschenbach, the band's conductor for the past nine years, had instilled a novel discipline in this 41-year-old ensemble. His conducting technique, full of dapper flicks, certainly seems precise to an outside observer. Yet the proof of the pudding is in the playing, and the sad truth here was that too many entries staggered on to the scene like late-night revellers piling on to a bus.

Redeeming features? In a half-empty hall (too many competing excitements, of more reliable quality, in the Proms' last week, I guess) Eschenbach did find the line of the opening movement. And his gently mocking pull-ups brought out the Ländler's ironies.

I enjoyed the concert's first half more. This comprised a scena for soprano and orchestra, Hérodiade-Fragmente, written in 1999 by the rising German composer Matthias Pintscher. As Herodias gazes into a mirror and contemplates her life, the orchestra mirrors not just her tortured line, but the turmoil of her inner soul. And perhaps, like a mirror, it also reflects the scene behind the gazer: the decadent evil of Herod's court.

This is territory that Strauss depicted supremely in Salome, but Pintscher's intense writing, rich in spine-chilling effects, ominous silences and heart-stopping explosions, doesn't suffer from the comparison. Well, not much anyway. And what a performance by the soprano Marisol Montalvo: superbly assured in voice, mesmerising in gesture.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010