Proms 54 & 55: Los Angeles Philharmonic / Salonen, Royal Abert Hall, London

LA produces an OK Choral

Ever since Henry Wood's Beethoven evenings the Ninth Symphony has been a Proms fixture – and one which, like "Land of Hope and Glory", seems likely to be with us to the end. This year's performance formed the major part of the second of two concerts given on Friday and Saturday by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen.

The orchestra is soon to move into its new home – a concert venue named after Walt Disney – but on Friday it found itself playing a 20th-century programme at the perhaps no less bizarrely titled Royal Albert Hall. From the start, incisive horns in the opening bars of Debussy's Ibéria announced in their sharply etched accompanying figures that precision of playing would not be an issue. Delicate solos for violin and viola, and chamber-like textures in the third movement, "Le matin d'un jour de fête", confirmed the point.

Just in those first few bars, however, lay the source of one's sense of unease, for the music seemed over-phrased, as if too precious for its own good. Efficiency was here, but minus the passion that is surely the essence of this season's Spanish theme.

Tearing around in Bartok's First Piano Concerto, however, the orchestra proved no less virtuosic, and as much in the driving seat as the soloist Yefim Bronfman, whose arms and hands, welded to the inertia of his body, kneaded the keyboard like a strip of dough.

All passion spent, the slow movement offered a vision of tranquillity, interrupted by a brazenly pagan outburst in which Bronfman's rapped-out ostinati idealised the composer's vision of the piano as a percussion instrument. There was much hammering, too, in the finale, swift and sharp, and introduced by a splendid episode of whooping glissandi from the LA trombones.

Salonen's own selection of excerpts from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet score made for a full second half. It was a pleasing sequence, with more narrative logic than the three existing official suites, but played without much affection.

Fortunately, everything seemed pitched to a greater intensity on the Saturday night. Perhaps the prospect of more dangerous music released the orchestral adrenalin. Preceding the Choral Symphony with Shostakovich's Second, composed in 1927 and a flimflam of atonal counterpoint ending in a bathetic ode to the October Revolution, was certainly a great idea, based as it was on the premise of unattainable ideals enacted in revolutionary music.

Gerard McBurney's programme note made an honest case for the music, as did Salonen's reading, although the BBC Symphony Chorus sounded less confident in Russian than the London Symphony Chorus had in Finnish two nights earlier.

A quartet of American and German soloists new to the Proms joined the chorus for the last movement of the Beethoven. The soprano Melanie Diener and the mezzo Paula Rasmussen, in matching vermilion, shared a fullness of tone that balanced that of Eike Wilm Schulte, whose baritone filled the auditorium as instrumental music gave way to song. The tenor Robert Gambill's more lyrical tone was a pleasing contrast. The orchestra might have delivered more punchy rhythms in the scherzo, but fine playing plus directed vision in the first and third movements created a sustained mood of rhetoric without overstatement.