Why so many empty seats at last night’s Prom? Bringing together several choruses, a percussion-augmented orchestra, dancers, actors, rock-band and children’s choir, Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is surely a Proms dream – a genuinely eclectic work with something for just about everybody. But even as some 11 different Welsh ensembles sung, jived, clapped and shouted for our entertainment yesterday, there was no getting away from the issues with Bernstein’s ageing, mongrel score.

Another day at the Proms, another English choral masterpiece. Last night it came courtesy of the newly formed BBC Proms Youth Choir – a moveable feast of an ensemble that will bring together different youth choirs from across the UK over the next three years. I can’t imagine a more apt work to inaugurate the project than Tippett’s bravely painful meditation on human cruelty and capacity for endurance, A Child of Our Time.

Our athletes over at the Olympic Village might not yet have brought home a gold, but in an all-English programme at the Proms last night the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and combined BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC National Chorus of Wales under Tadaaki Otaka surely did just that. As the brash, glittering tumult of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast – “Praise ye the god of gold” – rioted around a packed Royal Albert Hall, the audience were still, marvelling at the skill and artistry of Britain (and Wales's) best.

Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.

Formed especially for the London 2012 Festival, the Aldeburgh World Orchestra does what it says on the tin: bringing together talented young musicians from across the world in a single youth orchestra. Under the direction of Mark Elder, musicians from 35 countries, including Jordan, Ukraine, Malaysia and Uzbekistan amongst others, joined together to perform a mixed programme of music from Mahler, Britten and Stravinsky, as well as the world premiere of Charlotte Bray’s At The Speed of Stillness.

And so we came to the Ninth. But wasn't it meant to be the only work on the programme? Why then was I hearing Boulez? A mishap: the final movement saw the quartet of soloists fall apart so comprehensively that, momentarily, it began to sound like they'd slipped into some unscheduled Modernism. We should be so lucky. No, we were still with this strangely anti-Olympian climax to the Beethoven cycle, where faster, higher, stronger had become slower, messier, more slug-like in Barenboim's hands.

Much has been written about how old-fashioned Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven cycle feels. Yet what can seem backward-looking is in fact a perfect reflection of Barenboim's personality. Each and every symphony appears with a swagger in its step and a cigar in its mouth. Last night's instalment - taking us to the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies - was no different.

We’ve had more than our fair share of Beethoven symphonies in London recently. But with the Proms’s monolithic Daniel Barenboim cycle now midway through, memories of Riccardo Chailly and John Eliot Gardiner are being steadily blotted out. Gone are the frisky tempos, the lightness of touch, and in their place we’re being reintroduced to Beethoven the heavyweight. There’s majesty here certainly, and occasional moments of compelling originality, but also a fair amount of frustration.

Last night's concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens was not a Prom for the fainthearted. After all, if sitting through a five-hour opera had been a daunting undertaking for the Covent Garden audiences last month - who could also enjoy David McVicar's eye-catching staging - then it was inevitable that anyone seated in the Royal Albert Hall for the visually pared-down version was expecting to feel very culturally virtuous by the end of the night.