There are some works that are so fixed in the memory it is impossible to listen to them objectively, however hard one tries. As an impressionable schoolboy, I heard the first performance of Roberto Gerhard's Concerto for Orchestra at the Cheltenham Festival in 1965, and I have unquestioningly admired it ever since.

Gerhard was all the rage in Britain then; the BBC under William Glock championed his music, and the composer responded with a final few years of ebullient creativity.

He had lived in Cambridge for 30 years, but was born in Barcelona, and always thought himself a Catalan composer. Studying with Granados and Schoenberg had mixed the pedigree still further, and the late works show those two lineages synthesised in music of enormous rhythmic vitality, tightly knit organisation and ravishing, instrumental colour.

Nowadays, the concerto is hardly ever played. But it opened last night's Prom, given by the Orchestre Sinfonica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, and was conducted by Lawrence Foster. It seemed as sparkling as ever. Twenty minutes of orchestral virtuosity that sustained itself on the sheer ingenuity of its scoring and its ability to come up with an inexhaustible supply of telling gestures, even if they are sometimes a little self-consciously rhetorical.

The Barcelona orchestra, a competent rather than outstanding band on this evidence, was making its Proms debut and, falling in with the Spanish theme of the entire Proms season, brought a heavily accented programme.

The jazzy, rather Gallic-sounding Canciones Negras, by Xavier Montsalvatge, were included as a tribute to the Catalan composer who died in May at the age of 90; the songs made an extrovert but inconsequential showpiece for Jennifer Larmore.

The mezzo also added her rich, rather unspecific timbre to Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, which had plenty of energy and authentic rhythmic insistence, but, to my mind, not nearly enough wit or vivid colour.

The only non-native work was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, which might have seemed just a makeweight had the soloist not been Viktoria Mullova. From the start her urgency and determination to newly mint a familiar work were startling. Everything was purposeful and to the point; the directness of the slow movement had no room for specious sentiment, the finale capered in an almost diabolic way. It was spellbinding.