Things may be falling apart, a storm now rages but new broods of humans and demigoddesses have been fathered by chief god Wotan, who has undergone a Doctor Who like transformation from Iain Paterson into Bryn Terfel.

Swimming around in the Rhine is what most of us wanted to be doing on the hottest day of the year. A cooling, riverbed low E flat from Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin double basses, and then the staggered horn entries announced we were going to be in the finest sonic hands for two and a half hours  – or nearly 15, if the colossal Proms Ring is to be accounted in its full, four-night glory.

Yes it’s Wagner Week at the Proms, and just up the road in the Royal Albert Hall there are dwarves and giants enough to rival Comic Con, and enough noise to silence any objection and obliterate all competition. Even the greatest of musical excess needs a counterbalance, however, and it comes in the form of the Proms’ chamber music events. Saturday’s matinee and yesterday’s lunchtime concerts couldn’t have been in greater contrast to the mighty Ring, offering up two miniature musical portraits.

Youth orchestras do well at the Proms. Built to the same sprawling scale as the Royal Albert Hall, their energy is also a natural fit for the relentlessly enthusiastic Proms audience. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the Aldeburgh World Youth Orchestra, our own National Youth Orchestra – year after year we marvel at the skills of these young musicians and come away with new demands to make of our professional ensembles. But last night the newly formed National Youth Orchestra of America showed their inexperience.

It’s a dilemma of anniversary years, and never more so than with Wagner’s and Verdi’s 200^th birthdays: do you stick to the masterpieces or try and bring the rarities to life? No-one would have minded, I suspect, if Antonio Pappano and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia forces he has raised to the level of one of the world’s great ensembles had reprised their peerless Verdi Requiem. It was unfortunate, then, if some of us sat with interest through unusual fare wishing for better alternatives in every case.

If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the writer who brought us Southwark Fair, a lively depiction of the local scene which never so much as hinted as the village-institute clichés and banalities piled high here in a production by Dominic Dromgoole which does little to finesse the sorry situation.

A second visit to hear this already great young Russian pianist in six months was meant for private pleasure only. Yet no-one in the Wigmore Hall audience last night, I’ll hazard a guess, will ever have heard Liszt playing like Sudbin’s in a first half which itself merited a standing ovation, so the world needs to know about it.

Anniversary years are essential to classical music, shaking up our regular rhythms of programming and listening every year with new emphasis and new discoveries. While Britten, Wagner and Verdi have all had their moments in 2013, it is Witold Lutosławski who may yet emerge as the unlikely hero. Last night his exquisitely stark Cello Concerto held its own against a major Adès premiere, itself written in memory of the elder composer – surely one of the 20^th century’s neglected greats.

You can get away with playing ballet music of the Ancien Régime on Bastille Day so long as you end with a revolution. That was how live wire François-Xavier Roth and his mostly French musicians angled it, covering nearly 250 years of Parisian dance premieres on their way to the Proms centenary performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Roth promised surprises in heading back to Stravinsky’s 1913 autograph manuscript, but those mostly came in the last minute, and plenty of other novelties delighted on the way to the sacrifice.

What a way to open. Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony is exactly the kind of work that the BBC Proms and the Royal Albert Hall were made for, and as the surging, over-generous music and Walt Whitman’s ecstatic poetry ring out across the space it’s hard not to feel just a little bit of heart-swell. Add to that conductor Sakari Oramo making his debut as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and you have a First Night to rival the excitement of the Last Night.