Monday's late-night concert, from Sinfonia 21 and their principal conductor Martyn Brabbins, obediently took over the Spanish theme of this year's Proms but used it constructively, to create a sequence of 20th-century pieces of startling contrast and variety.
If the longest piece in the programme was George Crumb's Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death, based on the poems of Lorca, then the highlight was the third work by Silvestre Revueltas in this Proms season. His Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca was composed immediately after the composer had received news of the poet's murder in 1936. It is arguably his finest achievement. The central elegy is its emotional heart, bittersweet in its harmonies and threads of melody, while the outer movements celebrate Lorca's energy and passion in dance, as the raw sounds of Mexican mariachi bands clash and mesh. The joyous duet for piccolo and tuba near the start sums up Revueltas's sound world: unexpected, teasing and totally original.
Certainly those bold poster-paint colours are worlds away from Crumb's confections, with piano and oodles of percussion played in unconventional ways, and amplification giving even the most ephemeral resonance an extended life. The poems are allotted to a baritone (Sanford Sylvan) who has to declaim, whisper and croon as well as sing, and also play percussion when required; the instrumentalists have to join in vocally too. As so often with Crumb there are striking moments and clear evidence of a remarkable imagination at work, but also a pervasive self-consciousness that seems now, 30-odd years after the piece was written, uncomfortably dated.
But with Brabbins directing operations there was a real poise and delicacy to proceedings, though the members of Sinfonia 21 had much more to chew on in Julian Anderson's Alhambra Fantasy. With every hearing this piece seems more and more masterly, a virtuoso piece of ensemble writing, dazzlingly detailed. Against pieces that revel so much in colour and texture, Stravinsky's Abraham and Isaac seemed forbiddingly austere and introspective; Sylvan delivered the Hebrew text with maximum authority but the compacted cantata remained a hard nut to crack.
