The sound of several pianos playing together is associated, almost invariably, with either the clattering mechanics of modernism or the whirling figurations of the minimalists. The Proms' Multiple Pianos Day aimed at placing our preconceptions in some sort of context. The modernists and John Adams were bundled together in the evening concert, with Edward Gardner conducting the London Sinfonietta. In the afternoon, meanwhile, Ludovic Morlot and the Britten Sinfonia gave us a broader if rather bitty spectrum of multiple piano potential.

Morlot got off to a perverse start with Fauré's Dolly Suite, written for piano duet, but given here in a saccharine orchestration by Henri Rabaud, which, paradoxically, contains not a single piano. Thereafter, Morlot fielded an impressive array of well-known two-piano teams. Katia and Marielle Labèque were heavyweight in Mozart's E flat Concerto, but mightily exciting in Lutosławski's Variations On a Theme of Paganini. The world premiere of Left Light by the fashionable Anna Meredith turned Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips into competitive duellists. Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals was done with bags of charm, meanwhile, by Lidija and Sanja Bizjak.

Gardner's concert was hit and miss, however. A roster of pianists including Ashley Wass and John Constable waged war with the Albert Hall's cavernous acoustic in George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique. Stravinsky's Les Noces was let down by unaccountably tentative choral work from the BBC Singers and a variable lineup of vocal soloists.

The high point was Adams's Grand Pianola Music, ravishingly played by Constable and Rolf Hind, and with Gardner finely attuned to its ambivalent amalgam of transcendentalist rapture and banality.