Prom 52 and 53, Royal Albert Hall, London/radio 3

Prom 52, Royal Albert Hall, London/radio 3

Nick Kenyon has put together some remarkable Prom programmes for 2001, but this midnight oil celebration of rare Finzi, boyish Lambert plus Britten's bewitching Nocturne, hovering between crepuscular Lucretia and the knotty soughings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, was a corker.

Take Finzi: easy (with Ian Bostridge's rapt tenor to hand) to slot in his wonderful Dies natalis, and they have done. But here the Britten Sinfonia served up a virtually unheard torso,Romance, coupled with Farewell to Arms: a rapturous Preface, then a glorious sequel in Finzi's neo-Bachian manner to match two little known (and rather good) Elizabethan-Jacobean poets, whose names, Knevet and Peele, sound like Ben Jonson's solicitors, and whom Finzi restores to life.

Bostridge's laid-back manner was perfect: muted sibilants, with even a tympani pianissimo for the now dumbed "ventriloquious drum". Peele's poem celebrated Elizabeth I's retired Master of Armour; Finzi imagines him tweaking swords into pruning-hooks and tending his bees amidspidery sword-hilts and mousy muskets like a benign Chelsea pensioner. They should play it in Macedonia.

By a Kenyonesque quirk, mice and bees resurface, amid Middleton and Shelley, in the l958 Nocturne by Britten, another unremitting pacifist: no mere anthology, for each poem is subtly linked and Lucretia-like susurrations pervade. Even Tennyson's abysmal, Blakean "Kraken" received the silken Bostridge treatment. The padding pizzicati and cushioned anger of Owen; the narrative formalism, then Vere-like outburst, of the Words-worth; and the magical unisons of front-desk strings for Avon's bard (Sonnet 43): all melded into magic. The phased obbligati were enchantment itself.

Constant Lambert at 20 was a scorcher of a composer. Stravinskian debt or no, Prize Fightsizzles with its bristly bassoons, atmospheric brass, bossy xylophone, and a brouhaha that ends like a motorway pile-up.

Lambert'sPiano Concerto, scored by Edward Shipley and Giles Easterbrook, cried out for more Poulencian fireworks: Philip Fowke mastered the piano role brilliantly; Cleobury understated the marcati, however; Lambert's doleful Delius-cum-Warlock chromatics came off best. As for Finzi's Romance – wow! Abetted by leader Pauline Lowbury, who clicked straight into the right rubato, and wonderful restraint all round, the Romance revealed Cleobury and his Britten Sinfonia team at its sensitive best.

Roderic Dunnett

Prom 53, Royal Albert Hall, London/radio 3

The levelling process that has ironed out so many stylistic differences between European orchestras has evidently stopped short at the doors of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Thursday's Prom showed Men-delssohn's old orchestra to be transparent, walnut warm and the possessors of an unforced virtuosity that suited the composer's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Music Director Herbert Blomstedt held the reins, jovial and boyish as ever but supremely sensitive to the magical wind chords that re-emerge before the end of the Overture.

Blomstedt is a sympathetic interpreter who reserves specific point-making for the most appropriate moments, aping the rhythm of Bottom's rumbustious theme, for example. The Scherzo kept to a sensible tempo but bounced out of earshot on the gentlest of flute solos and the brass excelled in the outer sections of "the Wedding March". It's wonderful music and fully deserving of the care and attention that the Leipzig players lavished on it.

Brass choirs were again of the essence in the New World Symphony, especially at the start and close of Dvorak's ubiquitous Largo. No one could have wished for a more genial New World, though Blomstedt lost no opportunity to engage with the tougher elements in the first movement's development section.

But perhaps the most successful movement was the Scherzo where, apart from the charm and vitality of the various wind solos, Blomstedt took great care to clarify Dvorak's rhythmic accompaniments. Similar priorities focussed the two Slavonic Dances that served as encores, the Polka-like No 7 and the dashing Eighth Dance in G minor. Both were played with considerable panache.

Midway between Mendel-ssohn's take on Shakespeare and Dvorak's American epic came Haydn, a fairly familiar C major Cello Concerto. Not that the world would have been much poorer without it, save perhaps for its light-hearted finale. But it offered a showcase for the soloist Truls Mørk, whose tone projection maintained a consistently high quality. Blomstedt's reduced orchestra was on the ball, and Mørk related visibly to its every gesture.

Rob Cowan

This Prom is repeated on Radio 3 on 28 December 2001