The first appearance of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at this year's Proms must have been a melancholy occasion. Alongside Delius's Brigg Fair and Elgar's Enigma Variations, the main work in the programme – the last concert in a weekend marking the 75th anniversaries of the deaths of Elgar, Delius and Holst – was Holst's rarely heard Choral Symphony, and that was the work BBCNOW and the same solo soprano, Susan Gritton, were recording in Swansea last November when their conductor Richard Hickox was taken fatally ill.

David Atherton, another of the orchestra's former chief conductors, was in charge of this performance. Yet even he and the combined forces of the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the BBC Symphony Chorus could do little to make a convincing musical or dramatic shape out of Holst's strange, introspective work, which incorporates copious amounts of Keats's poetry, most famously his Ode on a Grecian Urn, yet too often fails to characterise the texts or convincingly match their lyrical beauty.

As Atherton and the orchestra showed, though, what is going on beneath the choral textures and the sometimes rapt soprano writing, which Gritton delivered with wonderful poise, is often much more interesting. The otherworldly side of Holst's music is suggested by the spare and delicate scoring, which uses the large orchestra with discretion. There are galumphing, slap-on-the-back moments of forced jollity too, and the bacchanal that ends the first movement is a pretty strait-laced affair, but generally it's the restraint of Holst's approach that leaves the deepest impression. This was his first large-scale concert work after The Planets, and if he wanted to compose that exuberant score's exact opposite, he got pretty close to it in the Choral Symphony.