Prom 63, 64, Royal Albert Hall, London

Prom 63, Royal Albert Hall, London

If post modernism signifies an end to the old idea of artistic progress and an endorsement of ever-varying mixes of styles past and present, then Mahler surely reached the "Post-" stage in his First Symphony (1884-96), before Modernism proper had really got going.

Everything in the score sounds as if in quotation marks. The opening octave pedal and falling fourths seem a variant on the start of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, but deployed in a montage sonore of birdsong and distant military fanfares. The main themes of the first two movements are pastiches from the Schubertian world of early Romanticism; the slow movement punctuates the "Frère Jacques" round with the skirlings of a Jewish folk band, while the frenzied first subject and ardent second of the finale sound beholden to Tchaikovsky. And far from subduing these disparate materials in a well-integrated extension, Mahler seems to exult in their collage-like juxtaposition as a structural method in itself.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its music director Daniel Barenboim brought this out vividly in the first of their two Proms. The emphasis was on the dynamic extremes, wide-open spacing and glaring scoring that must have sounded so strange to early audiences used to the saturated textures of post-Wagnerian Romanticism. Though as to that, the orchestra had already launched the evening with a long-phrased and richly blended account of Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture (1845), notable for the hushed intensity of its quietest moments.

So why did Elliott Carter's 17-minute Partita (1993) fail to come off? This is a knife-edge affair: a dialectic of contrasting materials, dynamics and tempi, unpredictably cross-cut with abrupt silences. But it is also dependent upon acoustics. Under Barenboim in the Royal Festival Hall and Oliver Knussen at the Barbican, the piece has sounded as punchy and immediate as a boxing match. In the vaster spaces of the Royal Albert Hall, the scoring seemed more evanescent and the implicit continuity between its far-flung textures proved harder to grasp. Maybe a slight insecurity at the outset of the performance reflected the players' acoustic disorientation, though there could be no doubting the commitment and virtuosity they bring to the work, nor the devotion of Barenboim to its composer, from whom he has commissioned two further scores.

Bayan Northcott

Prom 63, Royal Albert Hall, London

Friday's late-night Prom of choral and brass music from the BBC Singers and London Brass and Reeds looked like a ragbag. The main attraction was the prospect of three items by Harrison Birtwistle: all recent, one brand new.

Yet Prom 64 turned out to make surprisingly coherent sense. Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia and Stravinsky's Mass contributed to the season's theme of exile, both having been written in the USA in the 1940s. Under Stephen Cleobury, the performance of the former was rather stolid; but the solos near its end were nicely taken. In the concluding Stravinsky, the singers sounded as though they were trying unsuccessfully to emulate the understated manner of a wind ensemble: the conductor's fault?

Birtwistle's contributions offered plenty in this composer's usual manner, but also showed that his stylistic range is now wider than of old. Sonance 2000 is typical in its fanfarings and fartings from displaced brass. A splendid opening to this concert, its far-flung sounds from players high in the gallery led to a stratospheric trumpet solo on stage and a magnificently dying, deep chord to finish.

Tenebrae David, a BBC commission for 10 brass, is a memorial piece for the art critic David Sylvester. Characteristic in its invocation of borrowed rituals in chorale-like processions of chords, it is full of marvellous moments. A loud flourish dies away to reveal another chord already sounding magically beneath it; fast, chromatic scales and pungent tuba add further dimensions. The composer made a rare appearance as conductor to delivera moving performance.

In Birtwistle's latest opera, The Last Supper, the "Three Latin Motets" are heard only on tape. In this British "live" premiere, these contemplative unaccompanied settings of familiar Latin texts appeared luscious by his standards; they are deliberately contrasted in style with the rest of the opera. But they seemed positively astringent beside Takemitsu's two Signals from Heaven for brass, which alternated with them here. Earlier in the programme, Takemitsu's Garden Rain had somewhat taxed these players; in these later pieces, where the composer is at his most Messiaenic, I again wondered if their uncertainty was due to Cleobury.

Keith Potter