Millennial plainchant

BBC Symphony Orchestra/ Andrew Davis; BBC Singers/ Nicholas Cleobury Westminster Cathedral, London ***

Watershed for Mahler

After two months of exile at the Proms there is a huge pleasure in hearing a great orchestra in a faithful acoustic. The only puzzle about Riccardo Chailly's visit last night to the Festival Hall with the Concertgebouw (the first of three this season) was the number of empty seats. Their programme of works by Webern, Berg and Mahler, all written within a couple of years of each other in Vienna at the very beginning of the 20th century, deserved to be a sell-out. Nobody does this repertory better.

Polished till they shone

Fifty years to the day since Richard Strauss's death, the first of Bavarian State Orchestra and Zubin Mehta's Proms invited us to reassess the composer's reputation as a lost romantic in a rational 20th century.

Sensitive lyricism

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Myung-Whun Chung Royal Albert Hall Rating: ***

In praise of magpies

There's a month to go until the Last Night, but audience participation at the Proms is already under way. Leonard Bernstein knew how to write show-stopping dance numbers, and the conga that closes the first act of Wonderful Town is no exception. This is a real feelgood musical and, during the second half of Wednesday's programme, it created quite a party atmosphere. Anyone disappointed that the conga was confined to the stage during the show proper had the chance to dance around the arena with chorus and soloists during the closing encore.

Light on a dark world

For no particular reason that I can discern, Carl Nielsen is a featured composer at this year's Proms. His music entered the season rather halfheartedly last week, with performances of his cantata Springtime In Funen and a suite of his incidental music to Aladdin. But the arrival of the BBC Scottish Symphony and Osmo Vänska for the first of their three appearances at the Albert Hall this month, brought something more substantial, the Sixth Symphony, in a thoroughly convincing performance of what is a problematic score.

Echoes of near home

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.