“Next he’ll be walking on water,” allegedly quipped a distinguished figure at the official opening of Simon Rattle’s new era at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra. Well, last night, with no celebratory overload around the main event, the homecomer was flying like a firebird, and taking a newly galvanised orchestra with him, at the start of another genuine spectacular.

After all the talk and anticipation, at last some music. Simon Rattle took up the reins of the London Symphony Orchestra last night – as its first ever “Music Director” – with a programme dedicated to home-grown composers whose lives span the lifetime of the orchestra.

From sunset to sunrise, across aeons of time, usually flashes by in Schoenberg's polystylistic epic. Not last night at the Proms: Simon Rattle is too much in love with the sounds he can get from the London Symphony Orchestra - here verging on a Berlin beauty - to think of moving forward the doomed love of Danish King Waldemar and the beautiful Tovelille.

Gorgeous sound, shame about the movement – or lack of it. That seems to be the problem with too many of Simon Rattle's interpretations of late romantic music. It gave us a sclerotic Wagner Tristan und Isolde Prelude last night, Karajanesque and not in a good way, loping along in gilded self-love before putting on a sudden spurt towards the climactic ecstasy.

Symphony is a word carrying heavy historical baggage. It’s understandable when composers dig for inspiration elsewhere. All the same, Mark-Anthony Turnage has grasped the symphonic nettle with Remembering – In memoriam Evan Scofield which received its first performance last night. Many more will follow, I’d venture.

The Big Mac – as in Ligeti's music-theatre fantasia on the possible death of Death – is here to stay. Back in 1990, three critics (I was one) were invited on to the BBC World Service to say which work from the previous decade we thought would survive. I opted for Le grand macabre, having seen its UK premiere at ENO in 1983; a certain distinguished arts administrator condescended to rejoinder that he thought "even Ligeti has disowned that now".

The BBC Proms is perhaps the only music festival in the world that would (or could) have programmed performances of Steve Reich in a Peckham car-park and Brahms by the Berlin Philharmonic within a few hours of each other. The audacity of it is glorious, the breadth exhilarating, and the fact that both sold out intensely heartening.

What do Boulez's Éclat, for 15 instruments, and Mahler's Seventh Symphony, for over 100, have in common? Most obviously, guitar and mandolin, symbols of a wider interest in unusual sonorities. But while Boulez aims, as often, for needle point precision, Mahler uses selective groups, at least up to his finale when he exuberantly exchanges night for day, to create peculiar and unsettling grades of chiaroscuro.

The spirit of the late Peter Maxwell Davies blazed in the Barbican Hall last night. Dear God, we’ve never needed his humane, inclusive vision more than now. It’s a measure of the man that his final work, The Hogboon, should fill a stage with hundreds of children, professional singers beside students and amateurs, a world-class orchestra – and Sir Simon Rattle; that it should be as rich and complex as it needed to be, with no concessions to its younger performers.

Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)