It’s hard to find an overarching theme to last night’s Prom from John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic. We veered from a solidly patriotic opening (Walton, Rubbra) through the high romance of Bruch’s Violin Concerto to the murkier stylistic no man’s land of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp. Musical emotions were running universally high however, and the cumulative effect was dramatic in the moment, but oddly unsatisfying on reflection.

It was mostly Russian night at the Proms, and mostly music you could dance to, as a hand jiving Arena Prommer rather distractingly proved in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. Even Prokofiev’s elephantine Second Piano Concerto was transformed into the ballet music Serge Diaghilev thought it might become in 1914. Much of this was thanks to the fleet feet and mobile shoulders of febrile BBC Philharmonic conductor Gianandrea Noseda. But even he could do very little with the odd man out in every way, Edward Cowie’s Earth Music I.

On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version.

You wait years for a live performance to test whether Tippett’s Second Symphony is a masterpiece, and then two come along within six months. Both are due to the missionary zeal of the BBC Symphony Orchestra management, determined to give an overshadowed English composer a voice in Britten centenary year. But while Martyn Brabbins convinced me totally of the Second’s dynamic journey back in April at the Barbican, Oliver Knussen caught its rarefied sounds but not always its progressive sense.

Reviewing last night’s Prom of British Light Music feels a bit like getting all AA Gill on your granny’s Victoria sponge. The collage of musical morsels from Bantock, Arnold, Coates and Elgar is music made with love, for pleasure, by composers who rated enjoyment over admiration. It’s music that smothers critical appraisal gently but firmly in its tweed-clad bosom, killing you with musical kindness. It’s also music that needs Xenakis-like precision if it is to come off, and more pep even than that.

The “Turning Point” in Colin Matthews’ so-named orchestral piece is a change of attitude, a sudden seriousness of purpose, a great effort of will to stop moving and take stock of where it - whatever it is - is going. That Matthews did actually stop mid-composition because, precisely as the piece tells us, he wasn’t sure he was enjoying the ride anymore is one of those extra-musical bits of information that perhaps holds the key to understanding the motivation behind it. Matthews says the piece wasn’t/isn’t about anything, that it’s an abstract and there’s an end of it.

And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled out across the Albert Hall like a benediction. It was a defining moment in Proms history, no doubt, and was greeted with a few moments of perfect - and I mean perfect - silence.

Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season contains not just those four, but seven complete Wagner operas.

The transformative power of the Royal Albert Hall at Proms-time never ceases to amaze me.

JThis year’s Proms have been accompanied by an unusual choral drone, a monotony of voices whinging about the prodigious heat at the Albert Hall. For one night only no one was complaining as the temperature gauge went up to something like 111. You’ve heard of the Hollywood Prom and Comedy Prom, the Gospel Prom and the Dalek Prom. As a troupe of classical Spanish dancers swished and swirled, stomped, strutted and thrust to pulsating Hispanic music, here was something never before seen: the Erotica Prom.