BBC Proms: Lazić, Lloyd Webber, BBC Philharmonic, Sinaisky

Several Prommers fainted, possibly out of boredom, in a longer than ever first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto. The boredom, palpable around me, came not from pianist Dejan Lazić transcribing the fiddle part for his own pleasure - a communicative musician might have made us forget the original - but from the failure of Brahms's song to soar. Dyspeptic by half-time, I found everything awry: several obscure concert overtures would have worked better than Frank Bridge's Rebus, I'd have preferred many short cello-and-orchestra pieces to Holst's Invocation and thought any conductor might suit Elgar's Enigma Variations better than Vassily Sinaisky. Wrong, fortunately, on the last two counts.

Best, though, to get the duds before the interval out of the way first. You couldn't really fault the spirited focus of Sinaisky and his alert BBC Philharmonic in the twists and turns of the Bridge opener; but Rebus, his last opus, really isn't one of the English original's better pieces, and the programme note should have known better than to talk it up. We were told to anticipate with pleasure "this marvellously concise and sparkling sonata form, with not a wasted note during 10 or so exhilarating minutes". For me, the opposite was true: in what Bridge presumably intended as a lightish curtain-raiser, there was no detectable shape, only fits and starts, splashes of accomplished orchestral colour and themes that promised rather than delivered. Eric Coates and Malcolm Arnold have a much better idea of what buttons to press in this sort of piece. Only in his chamber works, it seems, does Bridge really move through time and space - though I was looking forward to his much more substantial Oration for cello and orchestra in part two.

Well, I got that wrong, skim-misreading what turned out to be Holst's Invocation. I also thought we were getting a rare Liszt transcription of the Brahms Violin Concerto. Wrong again: for Liszt read Lazić, young Croatian firebrand, who wanted to play the work himself - so hey presto, fill out the textures, make three quarters of the cadenza your own - much more audacity required for that to work - and there you have it, Brahms's "Piano Concerto No 3".

The soloist's opening flourish found him hoist by the petard of his own grandiose writing; could a violinist get this wrong? I doubt it. But I still don't think a keyboard version would be too impossible if only the pianist (Lazić pictured right by Susie Knoll) could make the melodies really sing and billow, giving us the necessary eagle of widest wingspan rather than this Behemoth grinding to a halt every couple of minutes. The only instrument to charm was Jennifer Galloway's oboe at the start of the Adagio. Pity those Prommers who didn't manage to stand the course, and indeed the children welcomed to this not too carefully selected chosen "Proms Plus Family" special (good idea in principle, of course).

Not that Lazić's playing was in any way insensitive, and a little Schumann encore gave us a more fastidious taste of true musicianship. But pace is everything in Brahms; it has to dance and sparkle, and unlike Christian Tetzlaff's performance of the real thing on Sunday, this one never got off the ground.

A necessary palate-cleanser came in the surprising form of Holst's early, short piece for cello and orchestra. It was refreshing, for a start, to hear Julian Lloyd Webber project the solo opening so unaffectedly into the canyon of the Albert Hall; and though the orchestral shimmering was a tad generic, trumpeter Jamie Prophet crowned the brief climax of this pretty garland with a special radiance. Lloyd Webber made further use of the special magic with which an unaccompanied soloist can draw the Proms thousands - and it was another full house - into his or her orbit with a choice encore, skewed pizzicato flamenco from Britten's First Cello Suite. A shame coughs destroyed the still end of the Holst, but the now ubiquitous police-car sirens vs Britten added a certain flavour.

I've said it before, and it struck me again: the quieter moments are often the most magical in this capricious colosseum. So it was again with the ghost voice of the clarinet (BBC Philharmonic principal John Bradbury) quoting, surely, Schumann's Piano Concerto rather than the usually cited Mendelssohn in the most enigmatic of all Elgar's "variations on an original theme", the three asterisks that make up the "Romanza". Anyone who missed the violin in the Brahms would  also have been consoled by the soulful appearances of solo viola (Steven Burnard) and cello (Peter Dixon) in several of Elgar's most introspective moments.

All of which, so difficult to realise, Sinaisky seemed to treasure. His "Enigma" was more a matter of colours and shapely lines rather than the personality quirks of the "friends pictured within". Elgar normally comes across almost manic-depressively upping and downing between feminine shyness and an over-assertive masculinity; but here even "Edoo" himself in the grand finale ran like a whippet instead of grunting like a British bulldog, despite the thunder of the Albert Hall organ. Sinaisky turned the big unison-cellos Variation 12 into a reminder that Tchaikovsky, whose Theme and Variations from his Third Orchestral Suite would have been an influence, is never far behind Elgar; and, best of all, he proved without fuss or false emoting that "Nimrod" waves no banner of St George but is purely and simply a natural wonder of a slow movement, written for a male friend of German origin (A J Jaeger) and inspired by a German (Beethoven), at the heart of a masterpiece which never puts a foot wrong. Sometimes it's the well-known so-called warhorses rather than the rarities which take one by surprise at the Proms, and this was one such night.

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