Prom 33: BBC Symphony Orchestra / BBC Singers / BoulezRoyal Albert Hall, London

Seventy-three evening concerts plus eight chamber music recitals make for a very long festival indeed, but such is the nature of the Proms. Inevitably, some concerts that look enticing on paper will fail to live up to expectations. But a concert conducted by Pierre Boulez in his favourite repertory would hardly seem readily to fall into this category.

A pre-concert profile suggested that Boulez was in good form. What was the problem, or indeed problems? Normally a frisson of excitement hangs in the air whenever he conducts. In the right works, he can secure wonders from the right orchestra in the right hall. But this seemed the wrong orchestra, the wrong hall and the wrong repertory.

An almost impossible remark, it might seem, since the programme comprised Edgard Varèse, two early (though much revised) works by Boulez, and a beloved Stravinsky. Is it the killer Royal Albert Hall acoustic, which robs any live audience of precision? Is it that the performers cannot hear each other, so intonation and ensemble go for a burton? Where were the famous Boulez ear, the famous Boulez precision? And where was the excitable audience? Something deadbeat hung in the air.

The concert began with Varèse's Intégrales, a short, terse exploration for 11 wind instruments and percussion, which in its day (1924/25) should have shocked. Varèse certainly anticipated as much. That Boulez should preface a performance of one of his own works with Varèse invites comparisons. Intégrales is precise, mechanistic, bleak, the insistent use of minimal material, the percussive colours rumbling and roaring. But the score is eminently compact.

Not so Boulez's Le Visage nuptial (1946), which, despite numerous revisions (the latest in the late 1980s) remains doggedly lumpen. Scored for large orchestra, women's voices and soprano and mezzo, the work is divided into five sections, each a setting of a René Char poem. Char is famously dense, wilfully obscure and ambiguous, so there's no need to reflect more than a mood. Too bad that the mood seemed so uniformly expressed – a wash of string sound punctuated by tinkling crotales, cowbells and mallet instruments in a bitterly dissonant soup. Françoise Pollet and Susan Parry strained at the high tessitura. How strange that Boulez was content with wide vibrato and "scooping" from both soloists.

Le Soleil des Eaux dates from two years later and has been subject to three revisions. Again setting Char, the first of its two movements separates the soprano solo entries from the orchestra, allowing the voice to function far better in this treacherous hall. But the grey harmonic language leached any vitality from the text. Greyness had set in, even in Stravinsky's Petrushka, one of music's most colourful scores. Mishaps, mistuning and poor ensemble brought a dull performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. That's unsurprising – Boulez gave little and got little.