The Albert Hall is a wonderfully theatrical space but the Proms, for understandable reasons, make the orchestral platform as close to a conventional concert hall as possible. Not, though, for Nomos gamma by the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, which requires 98 musicians “distributed among the audience”.

That’s a tall order and David Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra had to compromise, arranging the players around the Prommers’ arena while the rest of us listened in from outside the circle. Not quite what Xenakis intended but the results were explosive, full of grunts, whines and belches as wind instruments, strings and seven hyperactive percussionists took turns to dominate.

Robertson set out the complexities with perfect clarity, as he did in Xenakis’s Aïs. An amplified Leigh Melrose emitted a sequence of pre‑linguistic, almost simian yelps, from which language, in the form of heroically sung texts from Homer and Sappho, slowly emerged.

Percussionist Colin Currie got an energetic workout, pummelling his many instruments one minute, caressing them the next.

Juxtaposing Xenakis with Rachmaninov is perverse but Robertson made the most of the slow burn of The Isle of the Dead, its dreamy waves providing balm after Xenakis’s aural enema. As for Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, it is one of several jokers in the composer’s pack, and, as always , his jokes are double-, even triple-edged: every sweetly lyrical passage heralds a pratfall, and vice-versa. If the humour could have been more abrasive, the players pinned down the many elusive beauties.

www.bbc.co.uk/proms.