Last night's Prom (that's Promenade Concert for all you massed ranks of non-Brits) featured one of my favourite pieces, the Brahms First Piano Concerto. I'm hoping for great things from Digital Radio, but meanwhile I had to make do with my rather poor analogue radio with its CD player that no longer works, and more to the point with its diabolical London SW1 analogue radio reception. Given these sonic limitations, I concentrated on the piano playing of Stephen Hough.

I have to say I wasn't impressed, or not enough, and if you aren't sufficiently impressed by the pianist in this profoundly impressive concerto, that's not good. I'm pleased and a bit relieved to see that this Telegraph critic shared my doubts about Hough as the pianist for this piece.

I'm spoilt by the recording industry. I first got addicted to this piece with the magnificent Barenboim/Barbirolli/EMI recording, and since then I've heard all the others I could get my hands on, including (most impressively) Gilels, Serkin, Arrau, and Leon Fleischer. The resplendent Barenboim performance still heads the list for me, despite the various imperfections which helpful critics have later pointed out to me.

But how could you possibly perform the Brahms D Minor perfectly? What matters that you create a mighty wall of sound, mighty enough for this mighty mountain of a piece. Barenboim does this. He seems to draw forth the power of the piano in a way that doesn't really seem possible, and of course the massive sonorities that Barbirolli draws from the New (i.e. the old) Philharmonia help enormously. But whereas Barenboim makes a mountain, Hough last night merely seemed to be smacking away at the rock face with a mountaineering axe. Something to do with peddling perhaps? I don't know. But it sounded all wrong to me. Choppy, percussive, petulant and small.

Apparently (again see the critic linked to above), the thing to have been listening to last night was the orchestra (Ivan Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra), who later in the evening did wonderful things with Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. I skipped that, but Radio 3 will be broadcasting the entire concert again tomorrow afternoon, and I hope I'll be able to fit in listening to the whole thing, and especially the symphony. It depends what else crops up. And maybe radio reception, which comes and goes here, will be better then.

In a way, radio reception of variable quality is rather exciting. When it's good, you get a real sense of occasion.