The opening weekend of the 2016 Proms took just the first evening to find its feet. Tchaikovsky’s wordless fantasy on Romeo and Juliet was to have begun the season but now followed an unscheduled Marseillaise, in defiant response to the Bastille Day killings. The BBC Welsh choir stood, but remained silent. The audience followed. Music needs no words to be understood. Tchaikovsky introduced us in murky wind and tiptoe pizzicato to the seething bitterness of the family feud. Only the billowing love theme remained cool as if it were too early for conductor Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to broach such passion.

Shakespeare is a Proms theme and so is the cello. The Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta took the stage in a crimson frock to play Elgar’s concerto for her instrument, an eighteenth-century Goffriller with tone as clear as spring water. One had a sense of déjà vu as the scalic climax of the first movement resembled too closely the same effect in the Tchaikovsky and to no greater effect. The allegro fizzed too carefully and the slow movement lacked the grip to wrest the attention of a distracted audience. Only the reprise of the weeping theme moved us with redoubled pathos.