What promised to be a memorable occasion on Friday evening – the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s appearance at the BBC Proms to conclude its European tour – descended into unseemly farce when a handful of agitators known as the Jewish Artists for Palestine staged a noisy protest and disrupted the concert.

The mayhem began towards the end of Margaret Sutherland’s aptly named Haunted Hills (1950), a symphonic poem which, to quote from Lucy Walker’s excellent note in the program, ‘conjures up an image of the Dandenong Ranges, an expanse of hills and rainforest near Melbourne, brought violently into existence millions of years ago through a collision of tectonic plates and volcanic eruptions’. Sutherland, ironically as the night unfolded, was also thinking of the anguish of Indigenous Australians displaced by white settlers. She said that the piece was meant to be a ‘contemplation of the first people who roamed the hills, their bewilderment and their betrayal … its seeming gaiety born of despair’.

Any sense of contemplation or gaiety ceased when the protesters, dispersed around the lofty Gallery, shouted taunts like ‘The MSO has blood on its hands’ and unfurled a banner reading ‘COMPLICIT IN GENOCIDE’. Chaos followed, heads swivelled, the orchestra eventually fell silent. Maestro Jaime Martín left the stage, followed by new concert-master Natalie Chee. The accusations continued for several minutes (the security was surprisingly lax), while lustier young members of the audience standing in the stalls returned fire with ‘Shut the fuck up’, rarely heard in the Royal Albert Hall. (Promenaders, as they are sometimes known, are no strangers to such protests. In 2011, pro-Palestinian campaigners interrupted a performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.)