Value for money being so highly prized in these parlous times, one shouldn’t carp when the First Night of the Proms runs the best part of three hours. Even if, as happened last night, intervals and general faffing around accounted for at least an hour of the evening.

What I find less acceptable is the trend of presenting not an epic single masterpiece to launch the Proms with a mighty thwack, but a parade of little teasers for bigger delights to follow in the coming eight weeks. Attending the First Night now is a bit like going to the cinema and getting all the trailers and adverts but no main feature.

Thus Stephen Hough, who plays all the Tchaikovsky piano concertos this season, was on hand to deliver the weakest of the four: the single-movement No 3. Hough played it stunningly; he sounded as if he was using at least 15 fingers and a couple of toes in the heroic cadenza. But it still felt like a taster for the “real” concertos to come.

Then, oddly, two very different pianists — Katia and Marielle Labeque, still the friskiest fillies on the keys — fizzed their way through Poulenc’s saucy Concerto for Two Pianos. This was chosen, it seems, because “multiple pianos” are another theme of the season.

Still, at least the redoubtable massed lungs of the BBC Symphony Chorus were allowed to set the wild echoes flying this year (last year’s damp-squib First Night had no choral contribution at all). True, we had to wait until 10pm to hear them all singing together — in Bruckner’s short but irresistibly grandiose setting of Psalm 150, hurled out with terrific verve.

But earlier the women had provided a beautifully sustained background to the soprano Ailish Tynan in Chabrier’s languorously tuneful Ode à la musique. Then the tenors and basses did much the same service for Alice Coote, in her most lustrous voice for Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody.

And what a dark enigma that work is. Written to celebrate the marriage of Schumann’s daughter Julie (for whom, it’s thought, Brahms entertained feelings that weren’t remotely prim or platonic), it’s an ardent prayer for a grumpy misanthrope to “open his clouded gaze” to life’s delights.

The extraordinary thing is that Brahms’s music starts as fervently as anything in Wagner, but then the passion dissipates into a religiose chorale. Pity that Freud wasn’t around in the 1860s to tell Brahms what he really wanted.

What of the BBC Symphony Orchestra? As at the Last Night of the Proms, this estimable ensemble — the workhorse of the entire season — was largely reduced to accompanying duties.

Stravinsky’s tiny Fireworks and Elgar’s masterly In the South overture showed how vividly the orchestra can play under Jiri Belohlavek.

But it’s sad that, on the two evenings each year when BBC TV deigns to put a live orchestral broadcast on a mainstream channel, its premier band isn’t given even a small symphony to show off its capabilities.

Editor's choice

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