South to London, then onward in the imagination to turn-of-the-century Paris, Liguria and the Baghdad of Sinbad the Sailor: the BBC Philharmonic’s latest voyage out of Manchester yielded a packed two-day travelogue. On the first of their latest pair of nights at the Proms, their chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda indulged himself in a concert performance of Puccini’s Il tabarro, the first panel of the little operatic triptych, Il trittico. The excuse was Puccini’s 150th birthday – and this dark little tragedy certainly makes a change from the composer’s ubiquitous and larger melodramas.

Car horns and tugs’ sirens parp and toot away in the orchestra, as an almost Debussy-esque introduction conjures the translucency of river mists and pipe smoke. Noseda and his orchestra had settled into fine form, and relished painting their ever-shifting backdrops to this tale of a mourning mother, a jealous husband, a lusty stevedore and, finally, a dead body rolling out of a cloak.

Tricky for a concert performance, though. While the ear can certainly focus on one of the most alluring of Puccini’s scores, it does help if the soloists occasionally turn and look at each other. Although there were no music stands – everyone sang from memory – Barbara Frittoli, as a golden-voiced, heartbroken Giorgetta, barely exchanged a glance with either her husband Michele (the dark-toned but somewhat impassive Lado Ataneli) or her lover, Miroslav Dvorsky’s ardent tenor Luigi. The real interest lay in the brightly-cast cameo roles: the tenor Allan Clayton’s outstanding Song-Pedlar, the touchingly sung young lovers Katherine Broderick and Edgaras Montvidas, and the double-act of Barry Banks’s Tench and Alastair Miles’s Mole.

On, farther south the following day to Alassio, for Elgar’s In the South – and now Noseda had passed on the baton to the BBCPO’s chief guest conductor Vassily Sinaisky. Fewer histrionics, and a more sinewy control of the score here: Sinaisky moulded a firmly contoured Ligurian landscape, graced by Steven Burnard’s beautifully poised viola solo. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, which ended the programme, also provided plenty of fine solo spots, with Yuri Torchinsky’s violin an irresistibly seductive narrator.

The main focus of this second evening, though, was Vaughan Williams’s 1926 Piano Concerto – last heard at the Proms in 1939. It’s a real period piece, taut with the pounding neo-classicism of Stravinsky, dizzy with a waltz that could have been Ravel’s, and with just a passing glimpse of those green pastures in the central Romanza. Ashley Wass, almost drowned out twice by a heavy thunderstorm, was a powerful and eloquent soloist in his long cadenzas and a hard-working collaborator with an enthusiastic orchestra.

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