Is there a single piece of music written for the Olympics that has ever outlived its original raison d'être? In the case of Chen Yi's Olympic Fire, a BBC Commission gamely delivered by the Royal Philharmonic, it seems particularly hard to imagine the Chinese composer's 15-minute fiesta carving out its own niche. This was the auditory equivalent of Beijing's pyrotechnic spectacular: big effects and lots of repeats.

It had its moments. The skittering marimba made a startling racket when allied to a legion of stabbing brass and chattering woodwind - the idea being to simulate the sound of the Chinese lusheng, a polyphonic wind instrument made of bamboo pipes. And having come up with that wheeze, Chen clearly decided that the rest could take care of itself: the piece romped merrily to its dancey coda, throwing in a hectic cadenza for the timpanist (he deserved a post-match pint) before its ecstatic conclusion. Still, the most spontaneous part of the performance happened during the applause: a wag in the arena who shouted “Free Tibet”.

It took until after the interval for the RPO and the conductor Leonard Slatkin to give us something to get our teeth into. Olympic Fire had been the preface to Olga Kern's disappointingly drab performance of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini: the young prize- winning Russian turned out a precise but thumpingly one-dimensional performance, lacking much wit or charm.

Slatkin was on much firmer ground with a double bill of Vaughan Williams. First came the winsome nostalgia (Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus) then the wildness of the Sixth Symphony, here a potent mixture of bleak, bleached resignation and almost carnival- infused craziness.

Was it because all eyes were on the modern face of China on Friday that Kristjan Järvi chose to raise the spectre of Mao in the conductor's late-night Prom? Perhaps. And John Adams's The Chairman Dances, an expanded interlude from his Nixon in China, certainly tickles the ear more than Olympic Fire. Leading the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Järvi ignored the pitiful turnout at the Albert Hall and did his best to burn the midnight oil in style.

The results were refreshingly invigorating. Another nod to sport uncovered the American composer Michael Torke's Javelin, a bouncy, pulsing workout. The superb South Korean cellist Han-Na Chang turned in an eerily compelling performance in Bernstein's Three Meditations from Mass, an arrangement that swaps the queasy sentimentality of the original oratorio for a far more cogent piece of musical drama. The explosive finale to Järvi's 20th-century stockpot was Duke Ellington's Harlem, and the Cardiff crew proved that they can swing as well as any New Yorkers.

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