The 2012 BBC Proms open on 13 July and end on 8 September. This is the full list of the 76 concerts. Book tickets here.

So Homeland is here, and mid-ranking-CIA-operative Claire Danes is chasing Marine-Sergeant-and-possible-al-Qaeda-double-agent Damian Lewis all over the shop (but really only in their heads, so far), and neither of them is getting anywhere fast, so Claire goes home for a kip and sticks on some relaxing music, and would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it? – another bloody jazz nerd!

The Rhythm Method by Nicky Forbes dives into the working, gigging, cash-free underbelly of real rock’n’roll life. Whereas most music biographies are written by or about those who’ve made it, who live in the gilded cage of pop stardom and all that entails, The Rhythm Method is about Forbes’s life as drummer in The Revillos, a cartoonish post-punk outfit born from the ashes of the more successful Rezillos. It is a chattily told saga of bad decisions, misfortune, dissolution and a persistent inability to realise when the game is over.

With the scheduled start time of last night's gig long gone and George Michael nowhere in sight, scurrilous jokes, gossip and unfounded rumours were floating around the Royal Albert Hall. We won't reprint them here but, needless to say, funny ciggies and Hampstead Heath were being mentioned. George's offstage antics might keep the red tops interested, but once he kicked the show off, backed by a 41-piece orchestra for the opening performance of the London run of his Symphonica tour, his glittering musical pedigree was absolutely centre stage.

Two years ago, Spiritualized reprised their bestselling (one might say "only major") 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, in the curiously titled concert series, Don't Look Back. Since then, their frontman (one might say "only notable band member") Jason "Spaceman" Pierce has been constantly promising new material, along with persistent assurances that the band's (would-be) seventh album will hearken back to the glory days of yester-millennium and also have a more-than-usual inclination toward pop.

Stately females sailed the corridors like grand multicoloured liners. Grown men in boaters and Union Jack waistcoats raced balloons to the Royal Albert Hall ceiling. Beachballs. Streamers. Flags. Fancy dress. One St George's Cross read "Votes for Women!" My first thoughts were: how lovely, in a way, that the mentally ill are allowed a day out like this.

What kind of work could possibly elbow aside the time-honoured ritual of performing Beethoven's Ninth on the penultimate (ie, the last serious) night of the Proms? The kind that even Beethoven was gobsmacked by. That's the sort of reputation that stalks Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, the prototype German Romantic opera, to whose crepuscular, horn-encrusted, tremolo-saturated, harmonic daredevilling and dramatic Gothicism the whole 19th century (and even Mahler and Strauss) paid homage.

After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, the Philadelphia Orchestra seemed poised to be the flagship cultural casualty of the financial crisis. Five months on and the bills continue to rise, but in the best Titanic tradition the band are determinedly playing on. It’s been five years since we last heard them at the Proms and their return last night under Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit saw a capacity crowd turn out to show their support and to hear the glossy music-making for which this orchestra is so justly celebrated.

You can count on one thing at the Proms: that the sound, if not on this occasion the cut-off point, of the extraterrestrial, wordless ladies’ choir at the end of Holst’s The Planets will scatter stardust through the Albert Hall solar system. Even, that is, if the performance is less than good, and last night’s was better than expected given reports of the same team’s near implosion in Beethoven’s Ninth. Hardly your average programme, either, with an unexpectedly lovely tone poem by featured composer Frank Bridge, and a surprisingly engaging float through the near vacuum of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s almost new Violin Concerto.

You can count on one thing at the Proms: that the sound, if not on this occasion the cut-off point, of the extraterrestrial, wordless ladies’ choir at the end of Holst’s The Planets will scatter stardust through the Albert Hall solar system. Even, that is, if the performance is less than good, and last night’s was better than expected given reports of the same team’s near implosion in Beethoven’s Ninth. Hardly your average programme, either, with an unexpectedly lovely tone poem by featured composer Frank Bridge, and a surprisingly engaging float through the near vacuum of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s almost new Violin Concerto.

Earlier this year, conductor Manfred Honeck revealed to me his love of old vinyl: the crackle, the fizz, the lost musical traditions. His performances are marinated in this obsession. The idiosyncrasies of his interpretations hark back to a time when the rules were fewer and the colours brighter. Last night was no different. His Mahler Five steered clear of the sleep-inducing modern fixations with orchestral homogeneity and tastefulness and instead jumped right off the deep end.