Classical musicians spend much of their lives inhabiting the realms of the past. To effectively practise and perform the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and countless others, performers must combine research and personal intuition to time travel into the era of these great composers’ lives. After months of exploration, as one begins to comprehend the social customs, politics and science of the era, a clearer understanding of the composer's individual personality and musical aesthetic begin to emerge.

Josquin: Missa Gaudeamus, Missa L’ami Baudichon The Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips (Gimell)

When did this weird mix-tape fashion take root at the Proms?

When you have 21 women to present in song, but only a couple among the 14 poets and none to represent them out of the 15 composers idolising or giving them a voice, you need two strong defenders of their sex at the helm. Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook are no shrinking violets – the soprano no longer a light lyric, the pianist supportive only in the best sense, full of flexible power and forceful middle-to-lower-range sonorities for the voice to coast above.

Frederic Rzewski marked his 80th birthday with a visit to the Wigmore Hall, for the premiere of his aptly titled Ages.

Punching well above their weights, population-wise, on the international music scene, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating, and being celebrated, in style over the year of their 100th birthdays.

To compose a masterpiece in your teens is rare enough; to choose the most elaborate form in chamber music, an octet for eight strings, ensures a peculiar kind of immortality. George Enescu, a still-underestimated genius described by protege Yehudi Menuhin as "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician...I have ever experienced", thought in complicated and unique ways at 19, leaving to posterity a difficult and elusive work.

Reformation Day, Luther 500 - in Proms terms it can only mean Bach, the alpha and omega of music, flourishing roughly two centuries after the Wittenberg Nightingale nailed his 95 theses to the church door.

The message must be getting through. On the First Night of the Proms, Igor Levit played as encore Liszt's transcription of the great Beethoven melody appropriated as the European Anthem; in Prom 2, Daniel Barenboim unleashed his Staatskapelle Berlin on Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance following an inspirational speech about European culture, education and humanism. Yesterday afternoon's manifesto was a given, showcasing the finest of all European bands under a Dutch citizen of the world who resided for many years in London. Bernard Haitink is also the world's greatest living Mozart conductor now that Mackerras is no longer with us - and at 88, his baton technique and his nuancing are more focused than ever in the love and passion they inspire.

You might argue that the Chamber Orchestra of Europe could play the programme in question without a conductor. But Haitink (pictured below) fine-tuned the dynamics in Mozart's "Prague" Symphony, No. 38, adding many more than are in the score, with a notably magical dimuendo back into the first-movement recap, and added his own subtle sense of space throughout, starting with the end of the slow introduction.

All repeats cried out to be heard with playing as hyper-alert and well sprung as this - and especially in Mozart's Andante, which Haitink now, surely, conducts more swiftly than he used to, making it a deeply expressive kind of minuet in a three-movement symphony where that ritual is officially missing.The woodwind playing was predictably both cultured and vivid, from Kai Frömbgen's very personal oboe solos to Clara Andrada's flute loudly protesting against the sudden ensemble rudeness at the heart of the finale.

Mozart's ubiquitous Third Violin Concerto might have seemed one-dimensional after that, a nice little exercise in 18th century gallantry, but not with another peerless artist, Isabelle Faust (pictured below), who as one-time COE member had to join her fellow violinists in the opening tutti. If from a distance in the Albert Hall you had to lean in to catch the nuances, that's no bad thing; and Faust's vibrato-light line in the Adagio was a delight. So was her choice of startling cadenzas by her frequent duo partner, pianist Andreas Staier, the last introducing a repeated pizzicato in homage to Mozart's use of it in a belated rondo-theme and carrying it over into the final fun and games.

No doubts, either, about any aspect of Schumann's Second Symphony – not an obvious second-half work – could possibly remain in an air-treading performance like this. The much-derided orchestration seemed perfect, with low horn notes cutting as much as the rest of the orchestra through the Albert Hall vasts. Haitink convinced us that this is one of the most miraculous scherzos ever written, so deft and sleight-of-hand in its transitions that you really wanted to applaud it and even call for an encore, as they did of old mid-symphony. The actual bonus, then, was apt, perfection again: the most gossamer-light dance through the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, proving that Haitink at 88 is still an ageless Puck at heart.

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Next page: watch Daniel Barenboim's inspiring pro-European speech in Prom 2