This Prom was the final concert of Andris Nelsons's remarkable seven-year spell as principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Their Prom showed the astonishing level of responsiveness and flexibility which he and they have achieved together, over the course of more than 300 concerts.

So it begins. Thousands of expectant audience members in a sweltering Albert Hall – heave ho! – riotous applause for the leader as he tunes the orchestra. A few more visits and all this will seem normal again, but it’s a culture shock to be thrown straight back in on the first night.

You might think that the carefree, gleeful melodies of sunny Californian surf-rock giants The Beach Boys would render them immune to the kind of egotistical wedge-driving that sunders most rock groups eventually. You would, of course, be wrong. Shortly after the band’s 50th-anniversary world tour in 2012, Mike Love, who owns the band’s name, took it away for his own version of the Beach Boys, leaving founder (and widely acknowledged musical genius) Brian Wilson and Al Jardine behind.

Hottest tickets for seats at the Proms have probably all gone already. Yet the beauty of it is that so long as you start queueing early enough you can always get to hear the greatest, or rather the most popular, artists, for £5 in the Arena which is of course easily the best place to be acoustically in the notoriously unpredictable Royal Albert Hall. And don’t say you’re too old to stand: a 91-year-old student of mine – her name, Grace Payne, needs celebrating – has been doing it, with a few breaks overseas, since 1947, and she’ll be there again this summer.

Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.

When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.

This feelgood programme hit all the buttons with almost unerring precision, as we followed Gareth Malone's project to prepare a military wives choir for a special prom, commemorating the World War One centenary on 3 August 2014. On the way we witnessed the joys of singing, the therapeutic value of music, and the virtues of hard work, mutual support and bonding.

Sheryl Crow doesn’t do genres. She may have recorded her first authentically country album, Feels Like Home, in Nashville recently, but for her, the tag seems to mean little. “It’s country, but it just sounds like a Sheryl Crow record,” she told the BluesFest audience last night, and whenever the subject came up afterwards, she put finger-wiggling inverted commas around the term “country”. She gives her audience what she knows they like, and what she knows she likes, too.

Georgie Fame opened the evening with a five-piece band, including the singer on his old Hammond organ. Favourites such as “Yeh, Yeh” were belted out to pleasing effect, as well as covers that included Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (Morrison played the packed-out BluesFest the previous evening). It was a strange, “extended” version that paid homage to a Paul Robeson number – Fame boomed out an African chant that bookended the song.

Chris Christodoulou is the official Proms photographer, writes David Nice. From his uniquely privileged position behind a velvet curtain, he captures the white heat of performance. The official shots roll off the press a couple of hours after the concert, but for the past five years our man in the Albert Hall has supplied theartsdesk with unofficial contraband images of conductors in action.