Prom 26: BBC SO/Enrique Diemecke, Royal Albert Hall, London

An oddly tilted flamenco opera

There is little in the charming songs and piano pieces that Manuel de Falla composed as a student to prepare one for the scope of his first opera, La vida breve (The Brief Life), completed in 1905 at the age of 29. Nor did he follow up its precarious synthesis of Andalusian inflections, French impressionistic colour and Italian verismo dramatics, moving in his later stage pieces towards more concise and stylised procedures. The touching melodrama of Salud, expiring at the wedding of her two-timing lover to a richer girl, remained unique in his output.

If Salud has never quite achieved the operatic status of Manon or Mimi, this is doubtless partly because, at 70 minutes, La vida breve is a bit short to fill an evening and odd in its theatrical timing. The slow first scene takes an age to establish its sultry backstreet Granada ambience. The second, in which the stricken heroine eavesdrops on the wedding feast, generates a fierceness of feeling, only to have it suspended in the pellucid ensuing orchestral link to the third. And Falla curiously pulls his punches in the final denunciation of the bridegroom.

All the same, the introduction of authentic flamenco into an otherwise bourgeois operatic form was a bold move for its time; elsewhere, the score is full of haunting moments, and, given an artist of the empathy of Victoria de Los Angeles, the innocence, passion and fatalism of Salud can genuinely tantalise. The Mexican soprano Maria Luisa Tamez, stepping in at short notice, had a mezzo-ish power and passion, but hardly the purity and line to realize the role fully; while Placido Domingo's protégé Jorge Antonia Pita, as the lover Paco, had the pleasantry rather than the power. Which rather left the incisive Felicity Palmer as Salud's grandmother and the flamenco duo of Pilar Rioja and Alfonso Cid to steal the show.

The Mexican conductor Enrique Diemecke drew spacious textures and a convincing ebb and flow of pacing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In La noche de los mayas, by the short-lived Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), which served as a first-half up-beat to the Falla, he produced some mesmerically quiet playing. Not that this 1938 film score includes many such moments – evoking its ancient Mayan ceremonies for the most part in Latin American percussion riffs and "barbaric" brass rampages. Effective enough; but this turbulent, tormented talent is surely better represented in his more densely concise orchestral pieces.

Radio 3 will rebroadcast this concert today at 2pm