In a Proms season awash with anniversaries, the survey of Stravinsky's ballets to mark the centenary of the start of his collaboration with Diaghilev is among the most important, given that the composer's works for dance remain synonymous, in many minds, with the fracturing of post-Romanticism into modernism and the starting point for a redefinition of the parameters of musical expression. Petrushka was the work chosen to kick the retrospective off, in a performance given by Jirí Belohlávek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra that promised much, but failed to deliver.

Belohlávek's way with the work was by turns cool and emotive. Stravinsky juxtaposes the idea of puppets that have feelings with human cruelty. The jarring slabs of sound that make up the ballet's cacophonic portrait of St Petersburg's fair had a faceless quality that suggested urban aggression, while the private nightmare behind the puppet booth curtains reeked of sensuality and despair. Belohlávek chose, unaccountably, to jettison Petrushka's death scene in favour of a concert ending that brought the score to a close with the second section of the fairground music, destroying the work's emotional trajectory.

The mixture of brilliance and disappointment also characterised the concert's first half. Belohlávek has been described as the perfect Smetana interpreter, yet The Bartered Bride Overture here was charmless. The panache with which Jaroslava Pechocová and Václav Mácha played Martinu's Concerto for Two Pianos didn't disguise the fact that the score is rarely more than workmanlike. The high point was Bartók's Dance Suite: Belohlávek paced the work superbly, and the BBCSO played it with a richness of sound that was ideal. The Proms run until 12 September. Details: www.bbc.co.uk/proms