Why is this genius playing to a half-empty Royal Albert Hall? Benjamin Grosvenor Prom reviewed

There were times during last Friday’s First Night of the Proms when it felt as if we’d been transported back to Ohio during the Eisenhower administration. We could have been in Severance Hall, Cleveland, listening to its orchestra under George Szell – and there’s no higher compliment I can pay the BBC Symphony Orchestra, because the irascible maestro drilled his musicians to parade-ground perfection.

You could tell the BBC orchestra was at the top of its game from the first snarls of the brass in Sibelius’s Finlandia – a more interesting piece of programming than it sounds. This was the choral version, in which the choir sings of Finland’s refusal to bend under Russian oppression. The principal guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska, may be a Finnish citizen (and married to Sibelius’s great-grandson), but she was born in Ukraine and was wearing a yellow ribbon. She’s a tiny woman with a smile you could see from space. She sang lustily to the words of the anthem – not that the BBC Singers, pointedly added to the BBC Symphony Chorus, needed any encouragement, since they were celebrating their own deliverance from the philistines who tried to nuke them this year.

The concert is still online; compare it with the YouTube video of Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and chorus performing Finlandia to mark the country’s centenary in 2017. It’s rousing but a little fuzzy at the edges. In contrast, under Stasevska’s slashing baton the brass fanfares achieved a machine-gun precision that was gleefully matched by the strings. And this splendour was maintained throughout the evening – though, admittedly, it was difficult to judge while the hall’s virtuoso coughers tore into the gossamer textures of Let There be Light by the Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak.