Prom 4: Abduraimov/Munich PO/Gergiev, Prom 5: Halle Choir/BBC Phil/Noseda, Royal Albert Hall, review

Valery Gergiev conducts the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC Proms 2016 (BBC/Chris Christodoulou)

Did Valery Gergiev dictate the menu for his Prom with the Munich Philharmonic? It was a strange idea to place Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No 3 between Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Rodzinski’s Rosenkavalier arrangement – two crowd-pleasers sandwiching a crowd-confuser, judging by the muted audience response. This little-heard Soviet composer’s sound-world of painfully scrunched dissonances radiated a frozen desperation – mirroring, we are told, her defiant isolation in life – but it had magnificent integrity. And it absolutely needed setting in a meaningful context, alongside other Soviet works from the same period.

For the rest we got a meticulously controlled account of Ravel’s Bolero, and a performance of “Rach Three” by a young Uzbek born to play it. Behzod Abduraimov brought a singing tenderness to the opening, sensitively commanding leadership to the piano-and-orchestra conversations, and infectious brilliance to the finale.

“From the heart – may it return – to the heart,” wrote Beethoven of his Missa solemnis. And under Gianandrea Noseda’s direction the BBC Philharmonic plus the Hallé Choir and the Manchester Chamber Choir provided a lovingly focused backdrop against which four solo vocalists (tenor Stuart Skelton and soprano Camilla Nylund both superb) could shine even from their awkward position behind the orchestra. The switchback momentum of this ecstatically wayward work took a while to establish itself, but finally all the strands were pulled together triumphantly.