The second encore said it all. Brahms's Hungarian Dance was, in one sense, brilliantly delivered - full of pull-backs and push-ons and clever dynamic tricks that few conductors and orchestras would have the technique to bring off. But it was also emotionally stillborn: a heartless exercise in musical efficiency delivered by a potentially virtuosic band crying out for liberating leadership.

That was the story of this concert and also, one suspects, of the New York Philharmonic's entire relationship with Lorin Maazel, whose $2.19 million (£1.2 million) salary as music director has produced far more brickbats than bouquets. Let's hope that the little-known Alan Gilbert, who succeeds him next year, can reinvigorate this underachieving orchestra.

It says something about this Prom that the only really spontaneous music-making came from the first trumpet, who produced a marvellously bluesy solo in the slow movement of Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. It quite upstaged the competent but strait-laced efforts of Jean-Yves Thibaudet on the ivories. And even that trumpet solo wasn't flawless.

But then, it was that sort of lacklustre night. The worst casualty was The Rite of Spring. That Maazel sometimes conjured up intriguingly veiled string textures, or brass outbursts that properly emphasised the savage, quasi-primitive nature of Stravinsky's writing, only made one more frustrated that the interpretation had so little passion, pace or propulsion. Watching Maazel conduct the famously complex metrical changes entirely from memory - and flawlessly - was actually more gripping than listening to the resulting sounds. That can't be right.

At least the New Yorkers brought some new American music with them. Steven Stucky's 12-minute Rhapsodies for Orchestra turned out to be an urbane, immaculately crafted piece, lyrical in places and tonally well-organised, in which ideas introduced by one instrument gradually percolated through the ranks. But so much of it sounded like something else - Copland, Mahler, Britten, Adams, whatever. A musical alien, visiting from outer space, would never have guessed that this tame, derivative effort had been composed nearly 100 years after The Rite of Spring.

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