Orchestra on song at the Proms

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"Thank you for holding," said the irritating mechanised voice in Brett Dean's Vexations and Devotion, adding that our holding was important to them, and finally embarking on a hilarious philosophical disquisition on different types of holding.

The texts of Dean's "sociological cantata" by Australian poet Dorothy Porter and cartoonist Michael Leunig articulate some of the intolerable vexations of modern life with bracing wit. But what makes Dean's score substantial is his deployment of instruments conventional and unconventional (water gongs, strips of aluminium foil) over a broad canvas that universalises Leunig's everyday "vexatious banalities" in a statement about the human condition.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson seemed fully on top last night in a performance involving the excellent young Gondwana Voices from Dean's native Australia as well as the everreliable BBC Symphony Chorus. An efficient but unimaginative Beethoven Seven completed the programme.

On Saturday night the BBC National Orchestra of Wales's French evening under its new principal conductor Thierry Fischer opened with a delicate-hued Prélude a l'après-Midi d'un Faune in which the solo flute gave a convincing impression of being behind a gauze, and continued with a similarly restrained account of Saint-Saens' Cello Concerto No 1 in A minor, with Steven Isserlis dispatching elegant bravura.

In Fauré's Requiem the BBC National Chorus of Wales and National Youth Choir of Wales joined the growing trend for performing without scores.