The Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London

Proms launch disappoints with its cautious line-up

So the Proms have rolled round again, bringing two months of joyous musical over-indulgence. There's a sense of homecoming each time we step back inside the Royal Albert Hall, a first-day-of-term feel, and we wonder where we have been for the past ten months. No other music festival engenders such a degree of affection.

One of the Proms' trumps, of course, is the setting: the Albert Hall is the ideal venue for those huge choral-orchestral works that are too big and too expensive for other institutions to tackle. But the Proms doesn't seem to grasp those nettles these days: the last time the boat was cast out for that kind of piece was in 2000, for Franz Schmidt's magnificent oratorio The Book with Seven Seals. Caution (read: bums on seats) now seems to be the order of the day.

The opening night likewise used to kick off with one of those stonking great choral works that made "A Statement": "Right, we're off – pay attention." This year the First Night was more like a set of salesman's samples, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin announcing this season's themes: three items of Spanishry (theme 1) in the form of Chabrier's España, Fandangos by Roberto Sierra, and Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, followed by Walton's Belshazzar's Feast (theme 2 – the Old Testament – and anniversary composer in one go).

España, for all its fizz, is not nearly strong enough to open the world's biggest music festival, and Sierra's amiable, nine-minute treatment of Soler's harpsichord Fandango is half orchestration, half gentle distortion – good-natured, bubbly fun that sounds like an up-to-date version of Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances. The Symphonie Espagnole is more froth – did Lalo really believe the fancy name would kid us he had written something more than your standard flashy violin concerto? Maxim Vengerov, looking like a diminutive Al Pacino, played it with all the sweetness and swagger it demands – it's written like the acting in silent movies and if you don't play it over the top, it flops.

And then Belshazzar's Feast, in the kind of performance you could hardly complain about, with the bass-baritone Willard White imperious and the BBC Symphony Chorus and visiting Choral Arts Society of Washington on their rhythmic mettle. But then they've all done it dozens of times before. There was nothing special here: we seemed to have dropped into a concert in the middle of the season. This ain't no way to launch the Proms – they deserve something grander.