Proms 40-42: Australian CO/BBC Concert Orchestra/John Williams, Royal Albert Hall, London

New world colours

The no-show by the tenor Ramon Vargas must have deprived half of last Tuesday's audience of their reason for being there. A more serious loss, it turned out, was of the two genuine Spanish items from an already chaotic programme, since the replacement singer Bonaventura Bottone delivered most of the evening's highlights and roused a full house temporarily to applaud as though they meant it. The veteran's voice proved itself youthful immediately in a melting "Una furtiva lagrima", and the perfect poise and easeful phrasing continued in the Flower Song from Carmen, which had an idiomatic elegance that has almost died out on the star circuit.

As for "Granada", the curiously isolated final item – no build-up, no encores – this enduring Mexican take on Spain gave the night its only real buzz. There should have been one from the orchestral Sensemaya by Silvestre Revueltas, an astounding deployment of European techniques on imagined Mayan material, wholly original and non-exotic, but after a powerful steady start the playing lost momentum. Otherwise the season's trademark cultural tourism ran riot. Passing off Mozart's Don Giovanni as Spanish was bad enough. Letting Bottone sing Puccini put the sequence all over the place, not that it mattered by then.

The most honest tourist composer was Aaron Copland, at least in El Salon Mexico. It was inspired when the American, on his first visit, was taken to a local dance hall and encountered the joys of Mexican youth, but despite borrowing a few tunes, he wove them so deftly into this exuberant score that you would scarcely notice they were not his own. The magic did not strike again 30 years on when he wrote Three Latin American Sketches, dry and patronising in contrast, despite some more bright trumpet solos from Catherine Moore. In Gershwin's uninhibited Cuban Overture the trumpets were polite and British, but the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Barry Wordsworth, generally delivered the goods. If they are going to play Revueltas, though, they need more strings.

John Williams and Friends – an Australian and four fine Englishmen – played "Impressions of Africa" as the late-night concert. It was a shock to find this taking the place of the usual world music Prom. Guitars in African music are like guitars in English music: foreign, often shunned, indispensable in many styles. The concept of following the instrument around the continent was interesting, the playing was superb, the arrange- ments with assorted wind solos and a double-bass were ingenious, but the cumulative effect was bland, the African character fitful. And what was it doing here? As with the Spanish theme in the earlier Prom, it's another piece of tourism crowding out the real thing.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra, as they have before, brought a piece by Peter Sculthorpe the previous day. Nourlangie, which gave Williams another solo spot, is not so much a concerto as a tone poem with the guitar as an involved commentator. Various scenes pass by, partly naturalistic – with positively animate squealing violins -–and partly reflective, all using a kind of circling process on quite diverse material, briefly reviewed again towards the end. It was just long enough to draw listeners conclusively into the haunting imaginative world of this major international composer, still oddly underexposed in Britain. Directed vigorously by Richard Tognetti, as heard on Radio 3, the orchestra had a virtuoso stab at playing a Janacek string quartet en masse with only the violins' intonation suffering honourable defeat.