Joaquin Rodrigo has been described as the greatest post-war Spanish composer. But he is a troubling figure. "Post-war" in the context of his music means the Spanish civil war. He spent the war years in France and Germany, returned to Franco's Spain in 1939 and rose to prominence overnight with the first performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940.

In its way, it is a masterpiece, though it also provided Rodrigo with a formula that stuck. He called himself an "authenticist", and believed Spanish music should be revivified by combining folk material with the polyphonic Baroque tradition associated with the glory days of the Spanish empire. His colossal output was therefore an extended exercise in dull nostalgia. Most of his music palls in comparison with Spanish composers of previous generations.

His so-called centenary concert - a year late, in fact - was a strange effort. It took place in a half-empty Festival Hall that grew emptier after the interval. Various dignitaries were in attendance, including the composer's daughter, the Marquesa Cecilia Rodrigo de los Jardines de Aranjuez. The conductor was Raymond Calcraft, the orchestra the Royal Philharmonic, on unsteady form. Rodrigo was given an honorary degree by Exeter University in 1990, whence also the presence of the Exeter Philharmonic Choir, though they sing Rodrigo's music none too well.

The programme placed the Concierto de Aranjuez alongside some of Rodrigo's unfamiliar music, the best of which was the song cycle Triptic de Mossen Cinto, written for Victoria de los Angeles. A suite from the opera El Hijo Fingido revealed Rodrigo to have been good at pastiche Rossini, though the two big choral works, Music for a Salamancan Codex and The Canticle of Saint Francis of Assisi are repetitive and drag interminably. The Concierto itself was played with an admirable absence of self-conscious flamboyance by Angel Romero, though his guitar line was unaccountably overamplified and he wasn't helped by Calcart's metronomic conducting, which robbed the outer movements of much of their swagger and panache.