Prom 51: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Briger, Royal Albert Hall, London

Over-elastic hispanic

Tuesday's late Prom was an ingenious tribute to the diversity of the Hispanic theme – rather too ingenious, in fact, for even the elastic palate of most Prommers, who deserted the concert in droves, leaving a mere Purcell Room-sized scattering of specialists and the homeless.

The main work, Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show), is a rarity even by this underplayed composer's standards, partly I suppose because it lacks the Spanish travel-poster elements of the three or four works of his that do get played. Its chief difficulty, though, is that it only half works as a concert piece, since its most striking feature – a series of long and musically somewhat featureless declamations for Master Peter's Boy – really needs the backing of the marionette action it describes to make much sense. Yvette Bonner somehow invested these thankless solos with a kind of gamine charm, though they taxed her vocal resources in this vast, empty arena.

The other roles, Master Peter himself (Timothy Robinson), and Don Quixote (Jonathan Lemalu) are barely more than walk-on parts at least until the finale, where the Don mistakes the puppet Moors for real ones and massacres them with his sword. Both were nicely sung. But the focal pleasure of the performance was the playing of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, who revelled in Falla's discreet archaisms and rustic musical courtesies, under their excellent conductor Alexander Briger.

Spain was a more distant presence in the other two works. Osvaldo Golijov's Last Round, for string nonet, is a tribute to his fellow Argentinian, the tango composer Astor Piazzolla, and self-consciously apes his sublimated dance idioms and the sound of his favourite instrument, the bandonéon, as well as, I suspect, the posturing of the bandonéonist (meticulously described in the composer's programme note). But musically the piece is more distinctive than substantial, just asits model often is.

Very much unlike Simon Holt's Canciones, a hauntingly intense and exquisitely imagined setting of poems about love and death by or derived from Lorca. The instrumental word-painting is fully the equal of Lorca's astonishing imagery, and even with the orchestra in full view one is frequently at a loss to work out exactly how Holt achieves these sounds. One is decidedly, here, in the dream world of Lorca's bleeding mountain sides and perfumed knife blossom.

There's nothing dreamy, though, about Jean Rigby's immaculate singing and the Birmingham playing, both of which were of needle-point refinement.