Time was when the BBC Symphony Orchestra played austerely wholesome programmes of modern and romantic classics to third-full houses. Now on a more varied diet – such as the collaboration with Neil Gaiman and Alwyn's Miss Julie in concert announced this week for their forthcoming season – they pull in respectable audiences, though last night’s concert of classical, romantic and contemporary Austrians had a reassuringly old-fashioned feel about it.

Practitioners of musical authenticity and scholarly research, so guarded and protective of their territory in the early days, now like to spread the love around.

The big news on this programme was Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande. This early score, completed in 1903, is a sprawling Expressionist tone poem, making explicit all the passions in Maeterlinck’s play that Debussy only implies. The story plays out through a handful of chromatically complex Leitmotifs, but such technical considerations are soon overwhelmed by the sheer urgency of the musical drama.

Like the fountains that sprang up in the desert during the Holy Family's flight into Egypt - according to a charming episode in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew - Berlioz's new-found creativity in the 1850s flowed from a couple of bars of organ music he inscribed in a friend's visitors book.

Forget the latest International Tchaikovsky Competition winner (I almost have; only a dim memory of Dmitry Masleev's playing the notes in the obligatory First Piano Concerto, and nothing else, remains from an Istanbul performance). Had Pavel Kolesnikov been competing and given a performance like the one he did last night, there'd have been a riot had he not won.

National feeling – in music, as anywhere else – depends on choice, not blood. This BBC Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican to mark the centenary of Poland’s rebirth as a nation never felt remotely like a feast of aural jingoism.

Single adjectives by way of description always sell masterpieces short, and especially the ambiguous symphonies forged in blood, sweat and tears during the Stalin years. The Barbican's advance blurb hit one aspect of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony - "startlingly buoyant" - and another in Prokofiev's Sixth - "contemplative".

Outside the Royal Albert Hall blue-bereted devotees were handing out free EU flags. A great many people accepted them, while some with the Union Jack looked on askance and muttered. But inside, all differences were firmly put aside: every flag under the sun was there for the Last Night of the Proms party, along with the glitter poppers, an inflatable parrot and a model kangaroo. 

This Prom had three pieces from times of social crisis, although only one faces its crisis head on. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring hides its pre-war angst behind a story of pagan Russia while Ravel’s post-war desolation is danced in decadent Viennese waltz time in La Valse.

The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved.