First Night of the Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London

Just in time to catch the last of the sunny spell, the Proms have arrived. As always, there was that warm sense in the Royal Albert Hall of carrying on where we'd left off - as if the intervening 10 months since the Last Night of 2010 was all just a dream.

The traditional way to launch the Proms is with a big choral shout like Verdi's Requiem. In recent years Roger Wright has tried something different; giving us a plate of hors d'oeuvres, cunningly arranged to give a taste of what's in store. For this season's opening night he neatly combined both. The second half of the programme was taken up with the earth-shaking Glagolitic Mass by Leoš Janáček, and as a foretaste of its pagan, starry-sky grandeur the evening kicked off with a brief new choral piece by Judith Weir, entitled Stars, Night, Music and Light.

Judith Weir is known for her wry, deflating touch - she once wrote a ten-minute grand opera for just one voice. So it was only to be expected that she would come at the genre of "grand curtain-raiser" from an interestingly sideways angle. Her setting of George Herbert's lines hymning the stars and sun was grand enough to need three timpani players, full orchestra and chorus and organo pleno. But it was light on its feet, and kept pulling the rug from under its sturdy major-key assertiveness with curious side-slipping harmonies. And it was over in four minutes.

Grosvenor has been groomed like a racehorse since his precocious win in the BBC Young Musician of the Year contest at 11: his parents and his tutors at the Royal Academy have wisely kept him out of the limelight until now, but he can no longer escape it. Last week Decca released his Chopin and Liszt debut disc, and journalists have been trying to set him up as a musical radical, but all he wants to do is play. "I'm not that talented," he recently observed with engaging modesty.

He is extremely talented. But his virtuosity is a delicate affair, ideally suited to intimate gatherings: the only question, as he launched into Liszt's second piano concerto, was whether he would find a big enough sound to conquer the hall's notoriously unfriendly acoustic. The work itself shows Liszt both at his visionary best and at his most thumpingly banal: Grosvenor's job was to create a space for himself, and, in the long stretches where the orchestra was just providing a backdrop, to make every note glow.

This he did with pearlised scales and cascades, but even in the nearest stalls we had to strain our ears; there is drama in this piece, but Grosvenor didn't bring it out because his tempi were too fast. As he took his bow in his Little Lord Fauntleroy jacket, the whole thing felt like a toe-dipping exercise, both for him and for us.

Then he sat down again – and was transformed. His encore was one of Brahms's Hungarian Rhapsodies, as arranged by that fleet-fingered Hungarian-Gypsy wizard Georges Cziffra. Using it to weave exquisite filigree patterns in the air, Grosvenor became a wizard too.