Proms Chamber Music 3: Eco Ensemble, V & A;, London <br></br>Prom 24: OSJ/Lubbock, Royal Albert Hall, London

So Spanish, it's fake

Out on the Prom fringe, last week saw two premieres, Manuel de Falla galore, and a brief view of Spain without tourists at lunchtime in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, given in the V&A chamber music Prom, is miniature in scale – six instruments, only a few minutes – and a towering feature of the instrument's repertoire. The composer wanted to prove that Spaniards could write contemporary European music as well as colourful postcards. He made his point with a enlivening burst of good humour and virtuosity, which the players of the English Chamber Orchestra Ensemble picked up on with energy, relish and all round warmth.

The superb assembly of wind and string players centred on the soloist Ian Brown. Switching to piano, he dominated an equally revealing performance of the Sextet by Poulenc, which found the dark side of an often patronised composer: anger and a tragic song, regret and stoicism, where others find amusement and wistfulness. No mistaking the rage and gloom either in the concluding tango by Astor Piazzolla, using the rhythms as a springboard for a concentrated tone poem.

The concert's centrepiece commission, Joseph Phibbs's La Noche Arrolladora, was described as "partly inspired" by poems of Pablo Neruda – an unfortunately accurate phrase. The inspiration was at the start, glistening high sonorities offset by punchy chords, subjected to a dutiful thinning out at decreasing speed until the music rediscovered its flair at the end. Sitting comfortably in the British don't-belong-to-trends school of contemporary music, it needed to start behaving badly if it wanted to be heard with more than polite respect.

John Harle's lurid The Little Death Machine, premiered in the late-night Prom, was full of spark as the saxophonist-composer's solo soared, blasted and panted over ghoulish riffs, swooping samples and a manic orchestral dance groove until this musical metaphor for vigorous sex arrived at its "little death". An engaging vehicle, it still left the sense that other composers challenge his virtuosity more dramatically, at least in concert works. This now-formidable creative figure often functions best in mixing genres, as he did with sax versions of two famous pieces that Miles Davis and Gil Evans made for their Sketches of Spain album.

What, though, to make of music at such a remove from its source? The adagio from Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and a number from Falla's El Amor Brujo inspired brilliant, fresh responses from Davis and Evans, freeing the musical essence from their exotic image – only to be turned back into museum pieces after their begetters' deaths.

Nothing was what it seemed in this peculiar programme by OSJ, the former Orchestra of St John's. The full, small-orchestra version of El Amor Brujo ended the set, with John Lubbock leading a straight, spacious performance – only to have it re-exoticised with a flamenco star, Ginesa Ortega, singing the vocal numbers. Great voice, but it made the orchestra sound stilted in comparison and she, in turn, seemed inhibited by the accompaniment which, in the Albert Hall, overwhelmed her. This score is so hard to hear now without the touristy overtones that it all needs the Miles Davis treatment.

As for the concert's entertaining opener, a zarzuela interlude by Jeronimo Gimenez kitted out with braying brass and over-the-top percussion, its tunes were so Spanish they sounded fake. Not such innocent fun, this was really fodder for the middle classes making a spectacle of their country's popular traditions. What a minefield this Prom season has laid down.