This was a five-star concert with a minus- one-star premiere. I would love to wax lyrical about the BBC Symphony Chorus's stirring singing of Vaughan Williams's grandiose Whitman setting, Toward the Unknown Region. Or, supplemented by the ethereal offstage amens of the Trinity College of Music Choir, its persuasive championing of Holst's The Hymn of Jesus - that weird and wonderful pot-pourri of ancient plainsong and ecstatic bitonality. Or its spirited revival of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven - a six-minute jaw-dropper, startling even by Charles Ives's standards, that melds Salvation Army hymns and wild evangelical cries in a thrilling sonic anarchy. Or the BBC Symphony Orchestra's admirable account, under Sir Andrew Davis's direction, of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony - an astonishing masterpiece, written in the aftermath of Hiroshima, that almost matches Shostakovich in its depiction of turmoil, trauma and, finally, exhausted nihilism.

All of that was thrilling, and worth hearing again on Radio 3 tomorrow evening (at 7pm). But instead, a weary sense of duty compels me to describe Dominic Muldowney's Tsunami, an RPS Elgar Bursary commission receiving its first performance.

It's hard to say what was the most grotesque aspect of this work. Was it the pathetic fallacy contained in James Fenton's whingeing text, in which a self-pitying loser seems to compare his failed marriage to the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people? Was it the horribly affected delivery of this text by an over-amplified Australian musicals crooner called Philip Quast, who slouched in jeans and seemed to require sips from a bottle of water every 20 bars?

Was it Muldowney's soupy, sub-Sondheim score, which sounded as if it came from a Las Vegas supper show, circa 1972? Or was it the notion of grabbing cheap publicity for a mediocre piece by naming it after the worst natural disaster of our time?

I don't know. It's already blotted out of my memory.

Editor's choice

• Exclusive: Listen to AC/DC's Black Ice
• Burning Bush with W
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse