Here’s programming for a credit-crunch August. Last night, all those who couldn’t afford Tuscany this year gathered to hear the next best thing, or at least the third next best thing, an evening of music inspired by Great Boot Italy.

Like the Azzurri in your typical World Cup, last night took a while to get going in a first half that was fitfully enjoyable. The orchestra was the BBC Philharmonic under its chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony was first up, starting rambunctiously with great pace then fading quickly.

This was a bloodless reading, the strings precise but undynamic and not quite gelling with paired winds about. Only the last movement was a relief, buzzing along with the right degree of vim.

Two Rossini numbers next from American mezzo Vivica Genaux, who seemed far more happy with the second of her two extracts: Non Piu Mesta from La Cenerentola was delivered with a winning girlish glee. Before that, Mura felici, from La Donna del Lago, was drily performed with a special lack of personality in the lower register.

Nice then, that the second half was much better, commencing with the Proms premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Roma Amor (it’s a palindrome, madam). This was great: an adoring investigation into the complexities of the Eternal City.

The first movement (called No Smoke Without Fire, but in Latin) makes immediate acknowledgment of Rome’s darker elements. Plainsong-inspired brass and timpani motifs blast their way past lighter interlopers — magically religious celeste and organ, a jaunty violin solo. The big guns shout them down and then, gloriously, co-exist in an exquisitely layered cacophany, an archaeological survey of the Roman spirit.

The second movement, by contrast, moves toward simplicity ­— its climax a perfectly beautiful chorale that could soundtrack a Hovis ad in heaven. In the third movement, Maxwell Davies turns his eyes to the heavens, rising from noisy street-level to a slow-swaying heavenly equilibrium and finishing with an all-together-now bell-peel that lifts the spirits high.

The orchestra’s exhilerating playing carries into the finale — Respighi’s Pines of Rome. You always worry that the voice reeling off Disney movies and John Williams scores this programme music reminds you of will distract from its gorgeous delights. Not so last night. Noseda shone. When the recorded nightingale sang in the Janiculum Hill section —well, one could have been there. But one wasn’t.