Period instruments are miles away from retro affectation, and as two Proms this week will show, can actually bring historical music up to the moment

Nostalgia. What a kick. And what a commercial boon for the music industry. Love the sound of 60s pop and 70s disco? You need the original synths if you’re a composer or producer. You listen to music on digital streams? Loser! Join the retro-future of vinyl enthusiasm, and feel the grooves under your fingers like your parents or grandparents used to. Or you can even make music physical again through the horrible medium of cassettes: all that plastic, all those tiny liner notes, all that high-speed dubbing.

Retro-futurists cherish what they claim is the extra warmth and sonic richness of vinyl, but there is no acoustic reason why vinyl is better. It is in fact objectively worse as a carrier of sonic information than any high-resolution stream of the same track, song or symphony. For cassette nostalgists, if it’s got that old-fashioned tape hiss, it sounds more “real”. We’re now looking for things to sound less clean. Because we distrust today’s technological utopia, we want signs that our music is less polished, less perfect, and thus more human.

Royal Albert Hall, London
In their second Proms concert, the Berlin Phil brought Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with Augustin Hadelich the virtuosic and breathtaking soloist), and a detailed and compelling take on Scriabin’s third symphony

It’s the clarity that hits you first. The soft thuds of timpani that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto landed from the back of the stage with the immediacy of taps on the shoulder, quietly urgent. The string sound was simultaneously luminous and translucent. Pizzicato bass-lines were shaped as if the main event and bubbled upwards through the rest of the texture. You’ll hear orchestral playing to match this on high-end studio recordings, of course, where the entire process can be geared to achieving such crystalline polish. And the BBC’s sound engineers can work miracles in real time on radio broadcasts of Proms performances. But to produce such lucidity live – particularly in the Royal Albert Hall, with its monumental bathroom acoustic – is another thing entirely.

For that, you need an orchestra of the calibre of the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. But violinist Augustin Hadelich also served up his own brand of astonishingly flawless musical beauty as the soloist in the Beethoven. In the first movement, his rising octaves appeared to float out of the orchestra, his bowing inaudible – the kind of violin-playing, in fact, that appears to defy the laws of physics. The slow movement was a masterclass in bel canto, the third a biting, bouncing romp as both Hadelich and Petrenko pushed gleefully through the rondo theme. The apparent ease of Hadelich’s virtuosity – all his energy seemingly focused on phrasing and dialogue with the orchestra – was nothing short of breathtaking.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The Gesualdo Six brought focus and luminous tone to a sequence of early devotional music; Reich’s Tehillim made a mesmeric and ecstatic pairing

When Steve Reich wrote Tehillim, half his long life ago, it was a very modern contribution to the ancient tradition of psalm singing. In this late-night Prom celebrating Reich’s 90th birthday, Tehillim was presented next to a sequence of devotional music from medieval Europe, making for what was surely one of this year’s most atmospheric Proms.

For the first half the stage was held by the singers of the Gesualdo Six, who brought intense focus, luminous tone and consistently outstanding vocal quality to polyphonic works by Machaut, Ockeghem, Dunstable and Josquin des Prez, all sung from memory, interspersed with solo melodies by Pérotin and Hildegard of Bingen. Odd one out, in theory, was a version of Hail Gladdening Light written in 2017 by Owain Park, the Gesualdo Six’s bass and director; but this brief chant-like solo for countertenor, with harmonies filled in by the rest of the singers’ humming, fitted in almost seamlessly.

The orchestra – at the Proms this week – is hailed as among the best in the world, if not the best. For my money, that’s quite possibly right, but why?

The Berlin Philharmonic are in London tonight and tomorrow at the Proms, days after closing the Edinburgh international festival in thrilling style. It was their first visit to Scotland in over 20 years, but the orchestra and their chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, are regular Proms visitors; their Royal Albert Hall concerts are always season highlights.

“The best orchestra in the world”, as it is often hailed, brings programmes that offer the expected and – for them – the unexpected. Tonight there’s Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony paired with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece that’s still an astoundingly rare visitor to this orchestra’s concerts; and tomorrow, the safety-first repertoire warhorse is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, but it’s paired with Scriabin’s brilliantly unhinged Third Symphony.

The finalists from the BBC young musician of 2016 have teamed up with a Mercury-nominated composer to craft a Proms premiere that’s uplifting, lyrical and goes out with an almighty bang

A cellist, a horn player and a soprano saxophonist walk into the Royal Albert Hall … it could be the setup for an exceptionally nerdy joke, but instead it’s a new triple concerto, with three soloists rather than the usual one, to be premiered on the final weekend of the Proms. The concerto – by Gwilym Simcock, the Mercury-shortlisted composer, jazz pianist and horn player who in 2006 was the BBC’s first New Generation jazz artist – reunites the three finalists from the 2016 BBC young musician of the year competition, hence the unusual lineup. “This is a unique combination of instruments,” says the saxophonist Jess Gillam. “I’m fascinated by the colours that we’re going to find. I hope we’ll be able to make a sound where people will think: what instrument is that?”

BBC young musician has launched many careers, but 2016 was exceptional: all three finalists have become major names. “It’s not like you win the competition and all these things fall from the sky, but it does give you a bit of public exposure,” says the horn player Ben Goldscheider, the 2016 brass section winner. “Then it’s up to you and the people around you what you make of that.”

Royal Albert Hall, London
A suite of reconstructed dance pieces from 1918 by Edmund Thornton Jenkins made a moving start to Chineke!’s Prom, where soprano Angel Blue sang Barber’s nostalgic Knoxville and Dvořák’s Symphony No 8 made a breathless finale

Slowly but surely, our perceptions of what a composer looked like in the early 20th century are widening. Chineke!’s ongoing mission to unearth music by forgotten Black composers here brought about the belated premiere of Ballet by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, its incomplete manuscript parts reconstructed by his great-nephew Tuffus Zimbabwe.

Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, Jenkins died in Paris aged only 32, having made a name for himself as a rising composer and band leader. In between he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where in 1918 he wrote his three-movement Ballet. It sounded persuasive here, as conducted by Jonathon Heyward. A substantial opening Processional, ominous then light-footed, gives way to a second movement beginning with a bubbling flute duet and a florid viola solo; together, these repeatedly show a gift for weaving together melody and countermelody. The flaw is in the finale, where the waltz that dominates the movement sounds unavoidably slender and staid next to the trumpet fanfare that announces it. Still, Jenkins rounds things off with an exuberant, uptempo ending.

Scotland’s Thea Musgrave is still writing radical music with perambulatory soloists and a message of hopefulness. Her latest work, for bassoonist Amy Harman, comes to the Proms this weekend

Thea Musgrave is a phenomenon. Born in Scotland in 1928, the composer has lived in the US since the early 70s, but has lost none of her accent, her infectious optimism, and her drive to keep writing. As she told me from her home in California, with a joyfully rolling laugh, “I’ve got to this age, and from now on I’m going to do what the fuck I want to do”. That includes her latest opera, on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – Orlando: An Escapade – which will premiere at the Buxton festival next year, and a new bassoon concerto for Amy Harman, Out of the Darkness, which you can hear at the Proms this weekend, on 23 August.

The bassoon concerto develops one of the central innovations of Musgrave’s life and career, which she’s still intensifying and exploring in her 99th year: what she calls her “dramatic-abstract” approach to her orchestral compositions, in which the players aren’t a single collective told what to do by a conductor’s gestures, but instead are released as individual characters and identities.

Royal Albert Hall, London
There’s a new narration delivered by Tamsin Greig and the crack forces of the Monteverdi Choir, the ORR and world-class singers, all led by Mark Elder, but the 200-year-old piece remains a strange hybrid

Pirates! Princesses! Mermaids! Fairies! A magic horn! You name it and Carl Maria von Weber chucked it at Oberon – his fantastical, nonsensical, often farcical romp of a final opera, which sees a French knight and his Arabian beloved subjected to magical trials and hardships so that fairy king Oberon can win an argument with queen Titania.

You can see how it happened. The opera’s English libretto (the work was premiered at Covent Garden in 1826) is based on a German poem, itself adapting a French chivalric romance, is a patchwork whose lumpen dialogue (and, latterly, unpalatable attitudes) have rendered it all but unstageable in living memory. Enter Mark Elder, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to give Oberon a Proms premiere 200 years in the making.

Royal Albert Hall, London
An acted prelude by Jane Mitchell teased out the composer’s motivations for his engrossing First Symphony before the orchestra assayed the work from memory

“Ridiculous,” “offensively trivial”, “a complete disaster,” just some of the critical barbs hurled at Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony following its Budapest premiere in 1889. A babel of such invective echoed around the Albert Hall launching the ingenious theatrical presentation – in effect, a staged programme note – that preceded Aurora Orchestra’s performance of the work in all its maverick majesty. Over an hour, actors and musicians took us on a light touch, deep dive into the circumstances surrounding the genesis of a symphony that frankly baffled its first audience.

“For those that listen closely, everything about me is explained in this music,” declared a beguiling Jack Bardoe, perfectly encapsulating Mahler’s combination of frenetic energy and artistic neuroses (“A bomb encased in razorblades,” is how one-time friend Ferdinand Pfohl put it). The setting was a psychiatrist’s office, with Sarah Twomey a forthright Sigmund Freud (“Tell me about your mother”) linking the composer’s compulsion to write music with a need to re-enact childhood trauma. Paternal cruelty, eight siblings lost in infancy and a disastrous love affair fostered a deeper understanding of what made Mahler tick.

When Mahler premiered his first symphony, it left audiences baffled. For their latest Prom, Aurora are bringing it to life – with the help of Sigmund Freud

In 2014, Aurora Orchestra did something that had never been done at the Proms before. We played Mozart’s 40th symphony – that has been done, many times – but from memory.

It was terrifying. Orchestral musicians usually start getting out their instruments 10 minutes before they go on stage, but people started warming up nearly an hour before – endless repetitions of fragments of music as players tested what they thought they might forget. We didn’t know if we would get on stage and freeze or fall off. Thankfully, we did neither and fear turned into excitement. Our bassoonist Amy Harman described the feeling as “like skydiving without a parachute. But in a good way.”

Royal Albert Hall, London
Outgoing chief conductor David Afkham brought Spanish repertoire, castanets and a certain team’s football scarf in a programme heavy with national treasures

What a night for Spain. No, not because of sporting happenings in New Jersey, but because – nearly 90 years since their founding – their National Orchestra finally made their Proms debut under chief conductor David Afkham to a packed Royal Albert Hall. It was a beginning, but also a celebratory end: Afkham hands over the baton to Kent Nagano next season. They came prepared, suitcases stuffed with Spanish repertoire and castanets – oh, and a certain team’s football scarf, as modelled by Afkham during the encore.

Afkham’s more than a decade with the orchestra hit its heights with Spanish repertoire, building on a legacy that earned the ensemble a Latin Grammy for best flamenco album under Josep Pons in 2010. Afkham didn’t stray far from the formula here in a programme heavy with national treasures, though noticeably lacking in Spanish contemporary music.

From Copland to Gershwin and a new Emily Dickinson-based commission it was America’s evening – but with a surprise Mancunian encore

And we’re back. The “world’s greatest classical music festival” has flung wide the doors of the Royal Albert Hall for another eight-week season. Where the Last Night of the Proms is often strangely separate – a self-contained musical party for an entirely different audience – the First Night is the celebration for those here for the long haul, the scene-setter and season in microcosm. So what does this year’s have to say?

Whatever its current geopolitical strain, the “special relationship” is live and kicking in the concert hall. The 250th anniversary of American independence is front and centre this summer (because nationalism is always less embarrassing when it’s someone else’s), trumpeted from the off with – what else – Aaron Copland’s crowd-pleaser Fanfare for the Common Man.

The musician first visited Aldeburgh as a teenage fanboy. Now, he is at the centre of this year’s festival as its featured artist – and he’s opening with his favourite opera

Ryan Wigglesworth cuts a confident figure striding through the Royal Academy of Music in London. He’s been a professor here since 2019 – juggling his duties with his role as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, guest conducting internationally, regular recitals as a pianist, and a busy schedule as a composer. Oh, and he’s also the father of three “boisterous” young children, whose sleepless antics have left him bleary and clutching his coffee this morning.

He sits at the head of the long table in the Academy’s oak-panelled boardroom, looking perfectly at home. Was he inevitably going to end up here?