The Philharmonia’s Prom should have been the first to be conducted by its newly installed principal conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. In the event Rouvali could not travel to London, and his place was taken by Paavo Järvi, who also took over the programme unchanged, and with it the much-anticipated appearance of another Proms debutant, the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, in concertos by Bach and Mozart.

It was Ólafsson’s crisp, clean solo disc of Bach that first brought him international acclaim, as well as a fistful of recording awards, three years ago, and there were certainly flashes of the musicality, immaculate technique and limpid tone that won him so many admirers in this performance of the F minor Keyboard Concerto BWV 1056. Yet, played on a modern concert grand with Järvi and the strings of a symphony orchestra chugging along in its wake, it all seemed bizarrely anachronistic, as if conjuring up the spirits of Myra Hess and Henry Wood and the Proms of the 1930s.

Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto K491 was equally well mannered – never indulgent, never exaggerated, even if the insistent staccato of Ólafsson’s glitteringly articulated passage work became too much of a good thing in the finale. But what is one of the most personal and searching of Mozart’s piano concertos was just a bit too impersonal here – beautiful, certainly, but never truly touching, or shaped with real individuality. Two encores – arrangements of a Bach organ sonata and Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, both unfolded without affectation – were reminders of Ólafsson at his best.

Two of the 20th century’s slighter symphonies framed the concertos. There was not a lot that Järvi and the Philharmonia could do with Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, other than dispatch it efficiently, but Shostakovich’s Ninth was far more interesting, uncovering the troubling subtexts to its apparent triviality.

• All Proms are available on BBC Sounds until 11 October.

• Andrew Clements listened to this concert via the live Radio broadcast.