Much of Peter Maxwell Davies's music since the early 1970s has been inspired by the islands of Orkney, but in the five orchestral pieces he has composed for the BBC Philharmonic, Davies has explored the area around Manchester, home of the orchestra, where he too grew up.

The first performance of the latest of them, Spinning Jenny, opened last night's Prom; it is a 20-minute single movement that takes as its starting point the sight and sound of the giant spinning machines which Davies remembers from his schooldays in Salford in the 1940s.

Yet the piece isn't pictorial in any autobiographical sense; there is no attempt to simulate the sound of those industrial dinosaurs, any more than it is a constructivist celebration of the triumphant march of technology as favoured by Soviet composers in the first heady days of the revolution. It's not even an exercise in dewy-eyed nostalgia for the lost innocence of youthful memories.

And though the dark murmurings of low wind and percussion with which Spinning Jenny opens might seem like the first stirrings of some gigantic mechanical organism, while the occasional tick-tocking of whip and tambourine hint at hidden clock works propelling the music forward, in performance the thrust of the densely organised argument seems entirely abstract.

So the orchestral lines pile up building to climaxes that are instantly quenched, only to begin the process all over again after a few moments of relaxation; it's a way of building musical tension familiar from many of Davies's orchestral works over the last 25 years.

The emotional core of the piece lies in those moments of reflection, when the thematic material is boiled down to its essence and cool solos - for piccolo first of all here, then later cor anglais and finally, to close the work, a trumpet - throw out tendrils of intricate, elusive melody.

They provide the landmarks in a work, which is rather short on memorable gestures. That lack of real character certainly could not be put down to the performance; the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by the composer, gave it a magnificently prepared premiere. And when their chief conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier took over the baton for Elgar's cello concerto, with Ralph Kirshbaum as the searching, poetic soloist, and for a sequence of supercharged extracts from Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, the standard was maintained.

On its present form the BBC Philharmonic is as good as any orchestra in these islands.