MUSIC / Songs of inner experience: Robert Maycock reviews the BBC Symphony Orchestra's premiere of Augury by Elena Firsova at the Proms

IT IS in the nature of things that most Proms commissions turn out to be worthy at best. But the last three years have all delivered outstanding or even sensational successes: Tavener's The Protecting Veil, MacMillan's Isabel Gowdie - in the same vintage season as the Poul Ruders Symphony - and most recently the Hugh Wood Piano Concerto. As sensations go, Elena Firsova's Augury is quiet, but its premiere on Tuesday revealed it as music of extraordinary beauty and personal character. This year, so far, it is the one I long to hear again.

The opening is understated, with horn and strings exploring as though bred by Berg out of late Beethoven, a probing trumpet a la Scriabin, a Tristanesque response from the strings again. Gradually the eloquent chains of chords, melodically led, flower in ravishing multiple layers of harmony, and fall back. Skirls of woodwind speed the pace; brass and pounding drums precipitate a collapse. As a moment of crisis approaches, everything hangs on the thread of a solo flute.

If the music already has visionary suggestions, it resolves them explicitly, linking itself back beyond Scriabin to the spiritualising conclusions of Mahler, Liszt, and Beethoven: a chorale in modern guise sets Blake's 'To see a World in a grain of sand . . .' before a brilliant scattering of liberated woodwind over a long-held fade. Augury has roots in an old and fertile tradition. It speaks, however, with a fresh and clear voice, stretching the BBC Symphony Chorus with its climactic chord but caught in this performance with a prevailing delicacy: worth preserving on one of the new BBC Music Magazine's CDs.

It was programmed with sensitivity. The Vaughan Williams Fifth Symphony of 1943, an agnostic's prayer at a time of struggle, with its Bunyan associations and a calm, revelatory answer to its questing, culminates in another delicate mesh of divided strings and was played with intense refinement. Vaughan Williams, who studied with Ravel, let his symphony begin as if it were Daphnis et Chloe with metaphysical doubts; and the programme duly had some Ravel, the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, bringing a rare appearance from Pascal Roge, or at least half of him.

On the soloist's part this was a performance of massive, precise strength and icy breadth. It thawed a little in response to some persuasive woodwind, but set hard for a thunderous final build-up in which Roge extracted complex resonances that few can persuade a Steinway to yield. Andrew Davis had begun the concert by conducting the Faure Pavane with as much affection and grace as the bigger works, though it was a pity to use the chorus just because it was there: Faure's afterthought to his original idea, an elusive setting of an even more elusive poem, needs an intimate and conversational manner which a full-scale choral society is too blunt an instrument to supply.