On the podium was Adam Hickox, the outstanding talent who impressed on his debut with the Orchestra in March last year. Here he displayed an expressive style with the baton which brought out the bright colours of these scores, without pushing the feeling into caricature or exaggeration.

The perfect illustration of this judgement was heard in the Festive Overture by Shostakovich. The BSO hit the ground running in this energetic music, its fanfares making an exciting opening to the concert.

The same composer’s First Cello Concerto shares some similar feeling, but the opening movement’s jolly march is coloured with deeply sinister overtones. The soloist Maximilian Hornung captured this double tone – so essential to much of Shostakovich’s music – with fine judgement, as he did the tenderness and anguish of the slow movement. He gave us a wonderfully inward performance of the Cadenza, which grew from the depths to a kind of tortured exclamation before the explosion of the final movement. A special word should be added for the lovely playing of BSO’s new principal horn, Eleanor Blakeney, with whom the cello seems to be sparring at points.

“This was a barnstorming performance concluding with an exciting, whirlwind coda, worthy of any stage.”

After an interval, much the least-known work in the programme took us to a magical world. Sophia Gubaidulina’s Fairy-Tale Poem looks quite thinly scored, but creates a richly three-dimensional narrative experience brought to life by the BSO’s strings, wind, percussion, harp and piano. The work seems rather balletic in quality, but also hushed and intermittently ghostly. A fascinating tale told by the orchestra.

The concert ended with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances which is such a festive work, bursting with life. This performance caught the darker, perhaps autobiographical, tones of the piece as successfully as the exultant ones. It also found a good speed for the first (Non) Allegro movement, where the main theme, surely one of this composer’s most beautiful creations, was truly moving. The BSO instrumentalists took every opportunity to display their musicianship and to exploit their familiarity with Beacon Hall’s terrific acoustic. This was a barnstorming performance concluding with an exciting, whirlwind coda, worthy of any stage.

The Proms are an important part of the British cultural summer, but London can seem rather a remote part of the country, so what a delight it was to hear the BSO taking part in the festival from its own stamping ground here in the west. Remember that the BSO’s main season in Poole starts on Wednesday 30th September with a Beethoven and Wagner concert repeated in the Bristol Beacon the next day and available online for 30 days. So many options to share the BSO’s brilliant music making.

BSO Patron Tom Wickson  

If you weren’t able to get to Bristol Beacon for the performance, you can listen again on BBC Sounds here.