The theme of this BBC Symphony Orchestra Prom, according to its conductor David Robertson, was "the notion of reflection and questioning", an accurate if ambiguous description. Robertson opened with Ives's The Unanswered Question, following it with Barber's Adagio for Strings. Given that Barber's threnody doesn't satisfactorily answer Ives's transcendentalist enigma, the juxtaposition created a sense of nagging unease. The Adagio's association with communal mourning, however, forged a profound link with the works that followed.

Zimmermann's Nobody Knows De Trouble I See (1954) and Tippett's A Child of Our Time (1941) ask us to reflect on music's ability to illuminate the crisis points of human history. Anti-racist statements written in response to Nazism and its aftermath, they have much in common. Both derive their forms from Bach: Nobody Knows, for trumpet and orchestra, is a chorale prelude, Tippett's oratorio a contemporary Passion. And both use spirituals. Zimmermann effectively restores to German music the black American influences that the Nazis were determined to remove. The great cry of "Let my people go" at the midpoint of A Child of Our Time, meanwhile, is central to Tippett's demand for a new spirituality dependent on the renunciation of racial divisions.

Håkan Hardenberger was the soloist in Nobody Knows, soaring above the orchestra with ecstatic ease. Robinson's restrained interpretation of the Tippett, meanwhile, allowed us to experience its formal austerities as well as its power. There was staggering singing from the newly formed BBC Proms Youth Choir, its members drawn from choirs round the country. The soloists weren't ideally matched, with Jubilant Sykes's bluesy style occasionally at odds with the more operatic approach of Paul Groves, Sally Matthews and Sarah Connolly. But the overall impact transcended the peripheral flaws. I, for one, was in bits when it was over.

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