Prom 58: New York Philharmonic / Maazel, Royal Albert Hall, London

One movement from Ravel's Mother Goose – "Beauty and the Beast" – might have described the first half of the New York Philharmonic's second Prom. But Ravel's ballet should by rights have made a starker contrast with Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, also given in its truncated suite form.

Lorin Maazel coaxed the orchestra into well-practised refinement. As his breathy first flute revealed "Sleeping Beauty", the sense of this being a Disneyfied, well-rouged kind of beauty was hard to escape. The delicacy of the playing was laudable and, true to form, Maazel ushered us into the fairy garden of the close with a gorgeous exposition that positively defied us not to sigh in admiration. Lovely, but self-regarding.

Bartok's rowdy evocation of a busy metropolis – generally considered to be the orchestra's home town – kick-starts The Miraculous Mandarin in ferocious fashion, string ostinatos not sparing the rosin, brass honking like 1,000 yellow cabs. But one sensed a certain disparity between the New York strings and brass. The strings just don't do ugly; the brass, meanwhile, seize any excuse to make themselves heard in a crowd – and do so in fabulous style. The trombone playing here was sensationally sleazy. But urban slickness ruled, and even those clarinet come-ons sounded a little too "prepared" for my taste.

Maazel has been preparing Tchaikovsky's Fourth for at least 40 years. He knows how it goes. He knows to catch the audience unawares, pumping a little extra gas into the first movement's nervy first subject; he knows how to build the fatalistic fanfares of the opening so that their return during the finale is the huge gesture it needs to be.

There was much to admire in this performance. Maazel kept the mannerisms in check. The solo oboe of the second movement Andantino was the more charming for its artlessness and the strings duly basked in their melancholic bitter-sweetness. Again, though, if you are going to make the finale really crackle, the strings need to project that extra fizz; they need to sound like they are pushing to the limit of their possibilities. Maazel could whip up the tempo all he liked here but without that edgy sense of every last desk in extremis, the excitement could only ever be superficial and short-lived.