Peter Maxwell Davies's new violin concerto arrived in Britain as the highlight of his 75th birthday celebrations at the Proms. Davies himself conducted the premiere, with the Royal Philharmonic and soloist Daniel Hope, for whom it was composed. The concerto carries the subtitle Fiddler On the Shore, and – as in so many of Davies's works – the land and seascapes of Orkney, his home for almost 40 years, have shaped the music, though the precise significance of its imagery has not been revealed.

If there is a detailed programme behind this single-movement work, it is certainly an uneasy one. Though the soloist had his moments of exuberance, going off into Scottish-snap rhythms and skirling reels, he also lapsed into deep introspection, and the orchestral commentary often threatened to overwhelm. The scoring was heavy, sometimes crude, with only a little of the delicate colours and tintinnabulations that one associates with Davies's Orkney soundworld; and though Hope played the concerto strikingly well, the sense of a real musical shape was missing.

In Davies's two choral works, given by the BBC Singers under David Hill in the late-night concert, however, the Orcadian connections are totally explicit. Both are settings of texts by George Mackay Brown that delve into the history of the islands: the rather austere, unaccompanied Westerlings, from 1977, evokes the Viking arrival in Orkney in the eighth century, while the luminous 1979 cantata Solstice of Light, with solo tenor (Ed Lyon) and organ (David Goode), chronicles their whole history and the successive peoples who have settled there.

The Proms run until Saturday. Details: www.bbc.co.uk/proms