So for one last time this season the impossible colosseum of Albertopolis became the Wagnerian holiest of holies – to be precise, the Cathedral of the Holy Grail - and once again I fell in love with the beast transfigured. Justin Way, the one artist common to all seven Wagner operas as their subtle semi-stager, should be the delegate to receive the award the Proms deserve for highest achievement of bicentenary year; and it seemed right to have Sir John Tomlinson, albeit by dint of another bass’s indisposition, giving his benediction as the witness of a final miracle.

Mahler, who like most of us thought Bach was “the greatest of them all” and studied in depth the edition of his complete works, would have been delighted by last night’s extravaganza – a true celebration of what makes the Proms the much quoted “biggest music festival in the world”. Only two Bach oratorios – cantatas in all but name – could possibly follow, after a sizeable break for supper, the Mahler symphony, his Second, which ends in such a blazing resurrection.

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.

Swimming around in the Rhine is what most of us wanted to be doing on the hottest day of the year. A cooling, riverbed low E flat from Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin double basses, and then the staggered horn entries announced we were going to be in the finest sonic hands for two and a half hours  – or nearly 15, if the colossal Proms Ring is to be accounted in its full, four-night glory.

Richard Strauss’s lavish postscript to 50 years of music theatre is about so much more than the theme of its source, Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole ("first the music and then the words", with a big invisible question mark). Its overall subject of rival claims in opera also embraces spoken drama, poetry, dance and specific bel canto, all of them marshalled by the most experienced of theatre directors. And a director is what this concert performance probably needed to bring its cast members into dramatic harmony.

Teamwork, as the song once said, makes the dream work. Homo sapiens knows this, if not quite by nature, then at least by nurture. Turns out that there are some chimpanzees in Leipzig which are all over the team thing too. Offered the chance to pull together on a simple mechanism to retrieve a nut – one each – two chimps will work in tandem to make it happen.

It only takes a few great Lieder by Schumann and Liszt to show the kinds of songs Wagner didn’t, or couldn’t, write. Very well, so the rarities in this programme were whimsies he composed in his youth, but even the Wesendonck Lieder, sole voice-and-piano masterpieces of his maturity, don’t show much concern for the little details of humanity. Fortunately Janice Watson rose to great form to show us what, quite apart from the two "studies" for Tristan und Isolde, their opulent generalities are all about.

With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929.

Sitting in the concert hall in Dresden’s Albertinum – the city’s modern art gallery – is a paradoxical experience. You are indoors, but faced on all sides by external walls, framed by Dresden’s typical bourgeois 19^th-century architecture but looking up to a giddyingly contemporary, asymmetric ceiling. Neon-lit signs cover one wall, while the other gives way to a gallery of classical sculpture.

The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty".