Prom 27, Royal Albert Hall, London

Edvard Grieg's incidental music for Peer Gynt, as heard in two popular orchestral suites and in countless TV commercials, has moved beyond its original application in the theatre, beyond the realms of classical music even, to become applied music in a uniquely iconic sense which befalls few works of art. That is certainly a tribute to its power, but also a handicap to hearing it unvarnished.

Leaving behind such associations was one of the challenges of last Thursday's Prom, in which the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck, with Simon Callow as narrator and with various talented principals, put the case strongly for the complete incidental music for Ibsen's five-act verse drama.

The famous "Morning Mood", for example, which one had fondly supposed as depicting sunrise over the fjords, relates in fact to dawn in the Sahara Desert. Whether this is an argument for or against the geographical specificity of music, the piece is no less good as prelude to an extended Arabian scene for Peer in Act 4.

Here, drawing on a tradition of "Turkish" colour he would surely have known first hand from Beethoven's Ruins of Athens music, Grieg composed, as far as one could tell, a masterpiece of stage-orchestral interaction, with baritone Bo Skovhus's largely speaking role and mezzo Inge Kosmo's Anitra projecting a fine sense of theatre from the platform of the Albert Hall.

An almost minimalist episode for strings and horns – simply scales going up and down – "Peer Gynt at the Statue of Memnon", had also been used by Grieg for "In the Depths of the Pine Forest", again casting doubt on music's specificity of place when divorced from symbolic elements like folk-song or Hardanger fiddles – an important lesson of the evening.

No less clear, however, in Barbara Bonney's heartfelt account of "Solveig's Song", as in the intense melodrama of "Ase's Death", was how music delivers certain emotional payloads with pinpoint accuracy. Indeed, to think for a moment of how, in less than two centuries, it had moved from baroque affect through classical decorums to a language apt to convey almost any feeling, and thus fit for pillage in the studios of Hollywood, was another of the evening's insights.

Visually surfeited, we find it hard to imagine there was a time, before cinema or photography, when the only place you might see a pirate or princess outside of an illustrated book and in the flesh, so to speak, was in the theatre.

The stage then must have been a more shadowy and fantastical world than it is now, where music had a parallel yet distinctly different role to that of the film score. Sadly, like that of the Renaissance masque and of Purcell's semi-operas, it can hardly be recalled except by facsimile.

Yet, relatively speaking, Thursday's revival was a great success. Might we now see more like it, maybe starting with the incidental music of Sibelius?

This Prom will be repeated on BBC Radio 3 on 9 January 2002. Box office: 020 7589 8212. www.bbc.co.uk/proms