You can count on one thing at the Proms: that the sound, if not on this occasion the cut-off point, of the extraterrestrial, wordless ladies’ choir at the end of Holst’s The Planets will scatter stardust through the Albert Hall solar system. Even, that is, if the performance is less than good, and last night’s was better than expected given reports of the same team’s near implosion in Beethoven’s Ninth. Hardly your average programme, either, with an unexpectedly lovely tone poem by featured composer Frank Bridge, and a surprisingly engaging float through the near vacuum of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s almost new Violin Concerto.

You can count on one thing at the Proms: that the sound, if not on this occasion the cut-off point, of the extraterrestrial, wordless ladies’ choir at the end of Holst’s The Planets will scatter stardust through the Albert Hall solar system. Even, that is, if the performance is less than good, and last night’s was better than expected given reports of the same team’s near implosion in Beethoven’s Ninth. Hardly your average programme, either, with an unexpectedly lovely tone poem by featured composer Frank Bridge, and a surprisingly engaging float through the near vacuum of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s almost new Violin Concerto.

Earlier this year, conductor Manfred Honeck revealed to me his love of old vinyl: the crackle, the fizz, the lost musical traditions. His performances are marinated in this obsession. The idiosyncrasies of his interpretations hark back to a time when the rules were fewer and the colours brighter. Last night was no different. His Mahler Five steered clear of the sleep-inducing modern fixations with orchestral homogeneity and tastefulness and instead jumped right off the deep end.

It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of any greater magnitude than turning your teenager’s bedroom walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade later, reeling from a series of very literal revolutions which have, over the past nine months, upheaved a vast tract of the Arab world and recalibrated the definition of people power. Revolutions which, the BBC now claims, were catalysed and facilitated by Facebook.

In a week that sees Proms visits from two major American orchestras, it fell to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to raise the curtain for their blue-blooded “Big Five” colleagues the Philadelphia Orchestra. With Tchaikovsky featuring large in both programmes comparisons are only natural, and it will be interesting to see what response Thursday night offers to an energetic but at times rather unsubtle evening of music from Pennsylvania’s “other” orchestra.

While revered and respected, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis has never inspired audiences with the same affection as Bach’s B minor Mass, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, or even Mozart’s Coronation or C minor settings. Perhaps it’s the austerity, the monumentality of the work Beethoven knew to be his greatest that rejects the easy assimilation into secular concert life, perhaps it’s more simply the lack of big tunes to wash down all that liturgy. Furtwängler famously drew back from the work’s sacred challenges as he grew older, but Sir Colin Davis is evidently determined to keep tackling a work whose performance he has likened to “failing to reach the top of Mount Everest”.

When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat. Jonathan Ross has unwillingly been away for a 10th of the time, having left under a storm cloud, but from the wall of squeals which welcomed him back to his regular gig you might have mistaken him for the Second Coming. Either that or those floor managers who encourage the audience to clap like stink are on double pay.

"Don't expect polish," announced Ivan Fischer apologetically. "Things vill go rrrong. We may start pieces again." The tuba had been turned into a tombola. The percussionists were playing their buttocks. Someone else was blowing a Hungarian didgeridoo. A certain amount of madness was expected from the second Prom, an experimental Audience Choice concert. But the Mahler One of the first Prom? Who knew that that would be equally if not even more outrageous.

Police. Placards. Protests. And bag checks. It meant only one thing. Jews were performing at the Proms. Here we were in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011 witnessing a stage of musicians being barracked and abused for having the gall to be Jewish. Last year, four more Jewish musicians, the Jerusalem Quartet, had the cheek to perform and broadcast a recital at the Wigmore Hall. They were again heckled and hounded off air. No, not a portrait of Europe in the early 20th century, but Britain in the 21st. I wonder.

Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark Wigglesworth glowed with wit. Yet hearing their ragged and unlovely account of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony last night it was hard to remember their triumphs, hard even to remember the delicate account of Graham Fitkin’s new Cello Concerto that they delivered in the first half, so complete was their collapse.

David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?