As experienced Wagnerian Jiří Bělohlávek came on to launch the BBCSO's new season in mid-air with the Tristan Prelude, I wondered whether the world's finest interpreter of Isolde's serving maid Brangäne, lustrous mezzo Sarah Connolly, was waiting to up her game, and her range, and tackle the Liebestod. Sadly not: that remained, as often in concert, Music Minus One. Connolly was there for a different kind of game-upping - a noble attempt to enter the charmed circle that's developed around the memory of the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with husband Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.

This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and his dauntless band of Philharmonia players have been wrestling with heroes. After a celebration of Wagner's Tristan, the legend-making shifted further north last night. Here was Sibelius first as the plain-singing, well-loved bard of Finnish endurance and then as the startlingly original creator of a musical alter ego in the shape of mythical adventurer Lemminkäinen. Salonen's edge-of-seat interpretation made two things startlingly clear: that the four movements of the misnamed Lemminkäinen Suite can constitute as radical a symphony as any of Sibelius's numbered seven, and that this surging orchestral tidal wave is as iconoclastic a work in its own rugged way as Wagner's opera.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

No, not some crazy remake of an Eighties soap featuring various members of the Bach family (though I wouldn’t put it past certain channel programmers to come up with the idea), but the Academy of Ancient Music’s (AAM) new series of concerts, which in a nutshell gives them the chance to perform lots of Johann Sebastian, with two bookend concerts covering the befores and the afters, as it were. Bound to get the crowds in and looks nice on the posters.

From primeval baying to a very human song in excelsis, Mahler's Third Symphony cries out for Olympian interpretation. That I've found in recent years with Abbado in Lucerne and the Albert Hall, Bělohlávek at the Barbican and Salonen on the South Bank. Since Vladimir Jurowski always demonstrates fresh thinking, and sometimes a burning intensity to match, the first performance of his London Philharmonic's new season was bound to be at least as challenging.

Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.

It must have been with a leaden heart that the BBC Proms planning team realised that 2010's Last Night would fall plumb on 9/11. How to reconcile all the traditional Brit triumphalism and singing of Jerusalem with the rather more contemporary need to reconcile all, whether out of Jerusalem or not? They did, and full marks for a delicate balancing-act of culture politics and a moving occasion last night (admitted by one who had spent a lifetime avoiding the Last Night of the Proms).

Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.

The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag.

How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike.

Two years after its first festive spree of 100 events, Kings Place has become the most congenial of all London's concert-hall zones in which to hang loose. On Friday afternoon I could have trotted happily between Russian piano classics, youth jazz and storytellers. I stayed with pianist Mikhail Rudy and cellist Alexander Ivashkin because I was intrigued to know how Rudy's stamina would hold out from a monument of the Russian repertoire in the first concert to a punishing transcription in the third.