Multiple Pianos was the theme of yesterday’s pair of Proms, beginning with a family-style afternoon concert. Ludovic Morlot conducted the Britten Sinfonia in charming performances of Fauré’s Dolly Suite and Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (Lidija and Sanja Bizjak the soloists).

The Labèque Sisters stunned with their sparkling synchrony in Lutoslawski’s Paganini Variations, a work they introduced to the Proms nearly three decades ago, and offered both subtlety and style in Mozart’s E flat Concerto, K365.

Anna Meredith’s new work, Left Light, with Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips the soloists, expands from “narrow and compressed material” to “something wider and wilder” at its climax. If intended as no more than easy Sunday afternoon listening, it perhaps justifies the award of a BBC commission.

John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, played in the London Sinfonietta’s evening concert under Edward Gardner, was the piece that controversially opened the door in 1982 to such postmodernist artlessness. Arguably a landmark in the early Eighties for those weary of modernism, Grand Pianola Music now sounds more than ever like the apotheosis of banality.

When new in 1926, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, with its electric bells and aeroplane propellers, sounded a genuinely futuristic note, though without the intended accompanying film it quickly outstays its welcome.

Moore and Crawford-Phillips, with percussionists Colin Currie and Sam Walton, brought a suitably metallic edge to Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, but the BBC Singers needed to tap a more primitivist vein in Stravinsky’s Les Noces.
Information: www.bbc.co.uk/proms.