The Controller of Radio 3 flourished a few unfashionable notions about “the power of music to heal and bind us together”; the Chief Executive of the Royal Albert Hall announced that Diana, Princess of Wales had been his friend, the hall’s friend andour friend; and between them it was agreed that Sunday evening’s Prom – a programme of Sibelius, Britten and Stravinsky – would remain unchanged. Except, naturally, for the prefatory tribute from Sir Edward Elgar, “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations, which would make us sob just as his Cello Concerto had done on combined Radios 3 and 4 earlier in the day. The role of national binder and healer is now incontestably Elgar’s but belonged once to Handel, and there was a time when Handel’s Jephtha, performed at the Proms the following day, would have flown the flag at half mast for all of us Not now. The
oratorio, based on one of those arbitrary, perverse vows in which the Old Testament excels (Jephtha shall kill whosoever cometh first out of his house to welcome him home after battle) – is a curious farrago of divine providence, flinty moral uplift, and crooked sentiment.

Inevitably it is Jephtha’s daughter who rusheth forth to greet the triumphant hero first. Jephtha, in the Book of Judges, does with her “according to the vow which he had vowed”. In the oratorio of the book, an angel drops in ex machina and lets him off.A case has been made for Jephtha as an Enlightened response to the problems of divine providence. Was it Handel who insisted Pope’s words from An Essay on Man – “Whatever is, is right” – were included in the text.

Certainly it was he who set them with such crushing, hammered finality, ending a sequence of sharply characterised arias and one quintet that is among the composer’s greatest achievements But the oratorio is not an unalloyed success One hates to blame Handel for it. A libretto whose second line is a parenthesis explaining just who exactly the tribe of Ammonites are, and which kicks off Part Two with a “Thus then in brief”, is little help. Handel, like any self-respecting Baroque master, depended for his profoundest effects on the reworking of familiar images and musical cliches, and it’s a good half hour into the work before he is given his head. Then he gets all the wafting angels, flowery farewells, and rev’rent awe he can comfortably cope with, and the result is magnificent.Just months before writing Jephtha the 65-year-old Handel had seemed in good spirits, buying up Rembrandts, packing off crates of English plants to the composer Telemann in Hamburg.

But, in the middle of the great, sunless chorus “How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees”, his eyesight failed Jephtha was to be his last oratorio. Anthony Rolfe-Johnson sang the title role with straightforward honesty; the Scottish Chamber Orchestra whisked efficiently through it under Sir Charles Mackerras; the New Company’s choruses rang sonorously. But only Felicity Palmer’s Storge – just the right side of operatic indulgence but hamming it up enough to convince one of her commitment to Scripture – seemed truly to have judged the oratorical temperature.It was pianists who dominated the rest of week of at the Albert Hall. Alfredo Perl, a young Chilean noted for his impressive Beethoven, branched out on Thursday and played Mozart, the great rhetorical, operatic Concerto in C, K 503. Soloist and orchestra – the BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier – had agreed their strategy.