MUSIC / The Proms: Jumping for joy at The Rite of Spring: Anthony Payne on Lazarev with the BBC SO and Tilson Thomas with the LSO

THE BBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA's promenade concert on Friday and the LSO's next evening amounted to a feast of Russian music and encapsulated one of the main streams in the development of that country's musical tradition. Under the direction of Alexander Lazarev, the BBC Orchestra brought an authentic fire and intensity to its contribution and avoided the obvious by programming Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto and Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances.

The Tchaikovsky concerto has never challenged the popularity of its famous predecessor in B flat minor (actually in B flat minor and D flat, though few analyses reveal this radical truth), and it is easy to see why. The thematic material lacks the inspired quality of the earlier work. Yet what interesting things there are in it, and when played with the vivaciousness and wholehearted bravura that Peter Donohoe brought to it on this occasion, it can still sweep an audience off its feet. Perhaps the music's thematic substance shows us Tchaikovsky a little below his inspired best, but the tonal structure as in the two-tiered key system of the First Concerto is fascinatingly adventurous and shows a new breadth.

If Rachmaninov preserved the Tchaikovskian tradition during a period when the history of music underwent one of its most far-reaching revolutions, he was by no means the passive conservative sometimes painted. Symphonic Dances, for instance, his last work, written in 1940, shows the composer extending his rhythmic processes and breathing fresh life into his established melodic and harmonic language. It is a splendid work and if it appeared anachronistic at the time of composition, this is no longer of any significance.

What is worth examining is the influence of piano sound and articulation on the music's instrumental style. Of all Rachmaninov's orchestral pieces this one seems the most influenced by keyboard thinking: indeed the two-piano version of the work seems in many ways the more satisfactory. It is the music's rhythmic tack and chordal writing that seem to reveal pianistic origins, and the tightest orchestral playing is needed to realise the composer's intentions. The BBC SO coped well with this particular problem even if the finale's rhythms sometimes needed a more cutting edge, and Rachmaninov's late vision drew a warm vein of lyricism.

The following night Michael Tilson Thomas directed the LSO in a thrilling performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and provided what will surely be one of the sights of the season as he leapt up and down in unison with the promenaders' stamping ovation while conducting them 'a la Rite'. His was an interpretation that always generated electricity, yet held just enough in reserve to allow the orchestra to build their peak of tension over the final pages, no small feat given the hair-raising conclusion to Part 1. Earlier we had heard Mischa Maisky in a commanding performance of Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. This concentrated masterpiece is both sardonic and personally confessional, and one could have heard a pin drop as Maisky delivered the demanding and structurally crucial cadenza.

Each programme also included a foreign element, and the LSO gave a stylish performance of Bernstein's suite A Quiet Place, while the BBC SO responded to the brilliant textural and thematic invention of Oliver Knussen's Third Symphony with great finesse. In an age when dialectic is in danger of becoming more important than the material it is based on, Knussen has the gift of inventing memorable basic motives, and his symphony made a dazzling impression, poetic in sound and mercurial in its processes.