Proms / New York Philharmonic Orchestra Royal Albert Hall, London / Radio 3

The open-necked shirts were entirely in character (play it again, Uncle Sam). The programming was not. What does it say about the current aims and aspirations of America's oldest orchestra that it should come to the most adventurous music festival in the world bearing a handful of pop-classics and only one piece of home-grown culture - and that from a superannuated conservative? Could it be that New World identities are still hung up on Old World values? That music director Kurt Masur is in some sense a late bid for time-honoured respectability? Not so much New World as New Europe? This is a swell band, and no mistake, but somehow or other their national character, the core of their identity, only truly emerged with Tuesday's final encore, when five of their red-hot brasses took centre stage and vamped it all the way to Dixieland.

Now that told us more about the abiding spirit of America in two minutes than Ned Rorem's Cor Anglais Concerto did in 22. And you thought they didn't write them like this any more. Take another look at the date - l991/2. So it's well made, deftly scored, companionable and agreeable - fireside America, home on the range. Must it be inconsequential, too? The second movement is subtitled "Love Letter", but it's a love letter to itself, an exchange of sweet nothings that beg no reply. The cor anglais is by nature a nostalgic voice - especially in the hands of NYPO principal Thomas Stacy (a marvellously fluid player with dreamy pianissimi in the upper register) - but, to take another of the work's subtitles, "Preamble and Amble", it lends itself to aimless reminiscence. A flash of urbanity, of anxiety, of unrest, comes late in the piece. But only to set up a prayerful response.

Till Eulenspiegel was a lot more fun. The lovable rogue came on strong, his contempt for authority written all over Masur's audacious, tongue- in-cheek rubatos. Masur knows his way around this circus. Fruity horns and trombones raised hell, capricious woodwinds darted for cover. And when the long arm of the law finally did bear down upon our simple-minded antihero, the shrug of the shoulders from that solo clarinet really did seem to say, "Who, me?"

The NYPO's spectacular first horn, ducking and diving through the opening measures of Till, was the undisputed star of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in Tuesday's second half. Glorious sound (the mellowest flutter of vibrato) and real artistry in the phrasing of his great slow movement solo. He alone brought a deep breath of Slavic songfulness to this curiously idiosyncratic reading. Masur began like the Pathetique had already happened. "Total submission before fate", Tchaikovsky noted on his original sketches. Submission, not extinction. This was portentous, thick-set, Teutonic Tchaikovsky. Languid, self-regarding rubatos inhibited even the yearning string melody of the first movement's second group. No spirit, no incentive to take heart, take wing and sing. And when Tchaikovsky doesn't sing...

Anne-Sophie Mutter can make the Brahms Violin Concerto sing and smoulder as few today can. So to say that this wasn't exactly her finest hour is still to acknowledge something patently superior. Masur had cut back on his strings to ensure a more democratic balance, enabling Mutter to take enormous risks with her fine-spun, diaphanous pianissimi. But still it had the air of a luxury item, a reading born of sound and effect more than spirit.

So, too, Masur's somewhat short-order selection from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet. The NYPO's wonderful section-leaders were duly paraded, versatile play-actors all (was there ever a more limpidly feminine Juliet than this solo flautist?). But when Tybalt goes down in a fight sequence more notable for its string articulation than its blood and thunder, orchestra and conductor should look to their motivation.

EDWARD SECKERSON