BBC Symphony Orchestra/Slatkin, Barbican Hall, London<br></br>Philharmonia/Ashkenazy, Royal Festival Hall, London

It's hotchpotch hell (otherwise known as a premature Prom) early)

If the Proms are famous for one thing apart from affordability and flag-waving, it is the matchlessly idiosyncratic programming of those concerts performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. For most of the year, concert-goers and musicians alike enjoy cohesive, clever, carefully-contrasted programmes that illuminate each featured work. Come July, however, and boomph! It's back to the sort of disjointed dates-from-hell that see Martinu jostle with Joubert or Jomelli and the ubiquitous 10-minute commission from a recent graduate.

Occasionally such concerts reveal budding genius or minor masterpieces. More often than not they simply leave the listeners baffled as to why they've sat through such twaddle before getting to the meat of whichever more substantive work is featured in the second half. Why indeed? The obvious explanation is fidelity to the annual Proms theme; be it prophecies or town-planning. But I've a niggling feeling that bran-tub programming owes more to the game that hard-core classical music buffs play with their CD libraries when they've had a few too many cups of real ale. Can you spot Froberger in five seconds? Takemitsu in two? Obrecht in one? Me neither. But I bet Leonard Slatkin can. And so, belatedly, I'll cut to the chase; which is that the BBCSO's inelegant hotchpotch of Weber, McPhee, Hindemith and Puccini/Berio at the Barbican this Monday was nothing less than a premature Prom.

Chinoiserie may have been the binding concept in this bizarre programme, but the sheer impossiblity of identifying the composers of the first two works in a blind test doubtless tickled the BBC boffins. In sorry contrast to their riveting performances of Tristan und Isolde under Donald Runnicles, the BBCSO had reverted to screensaver mode: anodyne, vaguely Vaughan-Williamsy and stylistically undifferentiated (qualities that might equally well be applied to Slatkin's conducting). But even allowing for this, should the irredeemably fatuous overture and march from Weber's Turandot have sounded quite so much like Edward German?

A brief detour took us to Bali – where Tabuh-tabuhan by Colin McPhee, the ethnomusicologist whose classes at UCLA so influenced American minimalists, showed that spacy Copland-esque melodies ill suit gamelan ostinato – before sliding back to China via the Turandot Scherzo of Hindemith's more satisfying Symphonic Metamorphoses. Of course, when Hindemith proves satisfying, you know you're in trouble. Nonetheless I am relieved that, in providing a frame for the British premiere of Luciano Berio's completion of Act III of Puccini's Turandot, Slatkin did not elect to perform the whole work. Having heard 25 minutes of his Puccini – a flat antithesis to the sinister, suspenseful, sprung, plush, refracted qualities I associate with the opera – and another 15 of his Berio, I suspect he has zero feeling for this style and zero ability to convey terror, sensuality or sexuality.

Watching Slatkin conduct is like watching William Shatner act; with stock-in-trade gestures aplenty – in Slatkin's case, the index-finger swipe, in Shatner's, the perplexed semi-frown – but scant specificity of character. Much like the latter concerts of the London Symphony Orchestra's Berlioz series, Turandot also suffered from uneven casting and a valiant but tonally inappropriate amateur chorus. Iain Paterson made an affecting, if over-youthful, Timur and Amanda Roocroft (one of the small handful of sopranos who can properly portray virtue) a touching Liu, while Christopher Purves (whose voice is now so fascinatingly tactile and glossy and muscular that you want to rub your hands over it as you would over the pelt of a tiger) was a sensational Ping. But Dennis O'Neill's creaking, calcified Calaf and the hardboiled tone of Eva Urbanov·'s Turandot – whose headachey fortississimi and abrupt pianissimi simply made me sea-sick – only drained what little sympathy remains for these selfish characters by Act III.

But what of Berio? As a rule, I'm suspicious of later completions of death-bed works. With the possible exception of Duncan Druce's 1991 edition, it seems Süssmayr naturally comes closest to Mozart's intended Requiem. By the same token, Alfano's Turandot is, aside from the vulgar reprise of Nessun Dorma, not so very bad. But Berio's Act III is a clever and sensitive modern alternative. Suggestive of Schoenberg and Wagner yet obviously rooted in Puccini's own increasingly radical and chromatically bold sketches, his orchestral interlude (representing Turandot's capitulation to the erotic) ducks the question of audience sympathy but provides a strong, if somewhat Wagnerian, motive for the lovers' mutual self-absorption. More importantly, Berio's Puccini does what Puccini's Puccini does; conveying a near-hallucinatory glare of transparent orchestral colours. I'd like to hear it in context. Minus Slatkin.

Of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Pauline Kael wrote that "when it's great, it's very great, but there are long deadly stretches." Much the same could be said of Prokofiev's score, which was, unusually, performed in full and in full cinematic context by The Philharmonia, Brighton Festival Chorus, mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy this week as part of the South Bank series "Papa, what if they hang you for this?"

When compared to its virtual opposite and near-contemporary Gone with the Wind, Eisenstein's epic is a clear illustration of the ideological fracture at the root of the Cold War. A more blatant piece of pop-culture propaganda is hard to imagine and I'm glad to have had the experience of seeing it. Both The battle on the ice and The field of the dead are more powerful when accompanied by the original images than in the context of Prokofiev's later cantata. But the soft, pendant beauty of Paasikivi's singing suffered too many button-pushing patriotic interruptions from Eisenstein's thick-but-brave cinematic peasants, and spectacular as the final chorus was, much of this extraordinary event was hamstrung by stage-screen co-ordination.

a.picard@independent.co.uk