Anyone arriving at the Albert Hall for Proms Brass Day could not help but see the various warning notices. We were advised that there would be "high sound levels" in these two concerts, the implication being that our eardrums were in potential danger.

During the world premiere of Peter Wiegold's He Is Armoured Without, perhaps they were. A vast, spatially conceived study of war, He Is Armoured Without is written for multiple groups of brass players placed in the hall's every extremity, slugging it out with one another in garish, rackety conflict, their tussles occasionally interrupted by quiet meditations from the strings and woodwind of the BBC Philharmonic, who occupied the main platform. It is thrillingly noisy, if occasionally uninspired. Wiegold himself conducted.

Elsewhere, things were more reflective. The association of brass instruments with ceremony and ritual in both Renaissance and traditional music was examined by His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts and by Tashkent, a group of karnay players from Uzbekistan. (A karnay is a long ceremonial trumpet which emits a deep snarling sound.) The Grimethorpe Colliery and Black Dyke Bands gave us music from Elgar to Henze, and Charles Mackerras conducted peerless performances of Schumann's Konzerstück for Four Horns and Janacek's Sinfonietta. The real tour de force, perhaps, was Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in Elgar Howarth's arrangement for brass and percussion, flamboyantly conducted by Hakan Hardenberger and played with jaw-dropping dexterity by the combined forces of the BBC Philharmonic's brass section and students from the Royal Northern College of Music.