4 / 5 stars

No British composer since Benjamin Britten has announced himself so decisively as George Benjamin did in 1980 with his first orchestral work. Benjamin composed Ringed By the Flat Horizon when he was 19 and a first-year undergraduate at Cambridge. Almost 30 years later, it still seems a wondrous achievement, with the formal confidence, understanding of instrumental colour and texture, and lucid harmonic sense that have characterised his music ever since.

Benjamin included the piece in his Prom with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Carefully unwrapping the instrumental layers and shaping the lyrical details, the performance perfectly conveyed the sense of tense expectation that pervades the work, which takes its title from a line by Eliot but depicts a landscape over which a thunderstorm is about to break. It is a piece in which the journey matters far more than the arrival, but Benjamin judged both perfectly.

The BBCSO went on to give a gentle, fond account of Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante Défunte, which led directly into his Boléro. Benjamin made that a tingling affair through sheer restraint, savouring the kaleidoscope of instrumental colour and holding everything in check until the final onslaught could be resisted no longer.

The first half of the programme had been much less convincing, however. Benjamin had opened with his teacher Olivier Messiaen's first large-scale orchestral work, L'Ascension, and found his attempts to unfold it undermined by some under-par brass playing, with hardly a single attack in the opening movement exactly co-ordinated. Stravinsky's Violin Concerto seemed a bit approximate, too. Carlin Widmann's account of the solo part was edgy and neat, and Benjamin accompanied crisply, but some of the orchestral edges were still distinctly foxed.

· Repeated on Radio 3 on Monday.