Let's not forget about the Cadogan Hall Proms

Five-star stuff: Alice Coote, who with Graham Johnson gave a recital of British songs at Cadogan Hall this week. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

I've been investigating a side to the Proms that some people tend to overlook, namely the concerts at Cadogan Hall. They don't, I've come to realise, get the attention they deserve. So much energy at Proms time is concentrated on the grander occasions at the Albert Hall, that one's awareness of them is sometimes lost. You can listen to them on the radio - like every Prom they're broadcast live - though none, to my knowledge, has ever been televised. Newspapers, of course, have only so much space for reviews and rarely, if ever, cover them in depth.

Timing is also perhaps a factor in their comparative neglect. This year, there are two sets: matinees on Saturday afternoons, and chamber concerts on Monday lunchtimes. Not everyone wants to give up a Saturday afternoon during the Prom season, particularly if there's a big concert down the road in the evening. Lunchtime concerts are very much a BBC institution and a very fine one - away from the Proms, many are broadcast from the Wigmore Hall. But going to a concert at lunchtime can be fiddly: it requires a long enough lunch break for you to accommodate the gig. And since you can't, of course, eat during the performance, when do you actually have your lunch?

Yet the Cadogan Hall concerts are important on a number of counts. Countless listeners and critics have always moaned that the Albert Hall is less than an ideal venue for small-ish scale works, and a downright impossibility for instrumental concerts and song recitals. All three should, of course, form part of any festival with claims to be all encompassing, and Cadogan Hall is at once large enough to accommodate a reasonable sized orchestra, and intimate enough for the detailed complexities of lieder.

The Saturday concerts, in particular, also draw a strikingly different audience. There are, of course, plenty of seasoned prommers, who are allowed to take the weight off their feet by sitting in the gallery, but at the opening concert last Saturday - a Shakespeare tribute with Alexander Shelley conducting the Britten Sinfonia, interspersed with readings by Timothy West and Prunella Scales - I was surprised to see just how many kids were in the audience along with their parents.

There are some good Albert Hall Proms specifically aimed at children scattered throughout the season, but this particular programme struck me as being essentially adult fare. OK, the proceedings kicked off with Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is enchanting when you're young. (Your understanding of the score's occasional darker resonances comes with age.) It was followed, however, by Korngold's (not very good) incidental music for a 1918 Vienna production of Much Ado About Nothing, then Stravinsky's very austere Three Songs from William Shakespeare. Frank Bridge's astonishing orchestral 'impression' There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook came next, beautifully played, and preceded by Scales delivering Gertrude's famous speech about Ophelia's death with disquieting sincerity. The whole thing was rounded off with Shostakovich's quirky, demotic incidental music for a Moscow production of Hamlet in 1932. The kids clearly enjoyed themselves throughout, completely giving the lie to the much-touted belief that children simply aren't remotely interested in classical music.

The first of the Monday concerts, a recital of British songs given by Alice Coote and Graham Johnson, was altogether a very different affair. No children, this time, just seasoned prommers and the kind of enthusiastic, if respectful audience you usually find at similar gigs at the Wigmore. It was, however, a great occasion - five-star stuff, if you want to give it a rating. Coote, much criticised of late for her cancellation record, was in spellbinding form for Britten's insidious A Charm of Lullabies, and did tremendous things with The Voice of Desire, which Judith Weir wrote for her four years ago. I don't share her predilection for Roger Quilter's songs, which are a bit naff, though she sang them to perfection. On the other hand, she opened by ears to Vaughan Williams's vocal writing with a performance of Silent Noon that was breathtaking in its sensual beauty.

In the space of 48 hours, in short, I became a convert to the Cadogan Hall Proms, and have every intention of going back to them, whenever the opportunity permits. If you want to do something different at this this year's Proms, then give up a Saturday afternoon or a lunch break and try to get there - you probably won't be disappointed.