Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.

Some operas shine in the vasts of the Albert Hall, others seem to creep back into their beautiful shells. Glyndebourne’s Carmen blazed, though Bizet never intended his opera for a big theatre, while Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, despite an equally fine cast from what’s now an equally fine company, Garsington Opera, left us with some black holes in the iridescent spider-web.

The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.

Mahler’s Sixth is one of those apocalyptic megaliths that shouldn’t be approached too often by audiences or conductors. It’s been a constant in Simon Rattle’s treasury since 1989, when he first recorded it with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (they performed it together at the Proms in 1995) to now, when the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concerts followed a recording. Sophisticated, yes, but where was the feral intensity?

Hot on the glittering heels of the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko, Sir Simon Rattle brought another stellar German outfit to the Proms, bearing the gift of a Bruckner symphony in the composer’s 200th birthday year. With his (relatively) new team at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rattle served a polished, sophisticated and superbly played Fourth.

Never mind the Last Night, it’s always the preceding Proms weeks which lead us through different rooms of a dream palace as visiting orchestras succeed one another. This year has taken on an almost hallucinatory quality as three great conductors – Jakub Hrůša, Kirill Petrenko and Klaus Mäkelä – appeared in close succession. If the Orchestre de Paris isn’t quite on the level with the Czech or Berlin Philharmonics, its love-in with its chief conductor was still electrfying at times.

Is it because the British are wary of national sentiment from a genius that this performance of Má vlast (My Homeland) is the only major London offering in Smetana’s 200^th anniversary year? Supple movement, emotional range and unerring climaxes from Kirill Petrenko and his Berlin Phllharmonic might encourage more interest in great operas Libuše and Dalibor (which Jakub Hrůša hopes for in his Royal Opera tenure).

In their lyrical, often intensely moving afternoon concert at the Proms, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos demonstrated such seamless communication that at points it was tempting to imagine that even their heartbeats were in sync. It’s an obvious statement to say that brilliant music making is as much about listening as playing, yet these three musicians took it to another level, deftly negotiating the Brahms and Beethoven with the elegance of bats finding their way by echolocation.

If you ever doubted that Bizet’s Carmen, 150 years young next year, is one of the greatest operas of all time, this performance would have changed your mind. Among the four principals only Rihab Chaieb’s utterly convincing, consistent protagonist was the same as on first night 22 performances ago, and as ringleader we had the vivacious conductor of the second run, Anja Bihlmaier.

Namedrop first: it was Charles Mackerras who introduced me to the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová, lending me a CD with her Military Sinfonietta leading the way. It piqued interest, but more as a sense of promise cut short: this abundantly gifted young woman, first female conductor of the Czech Philiharmonic at the age of 22 when she premiered the work, died three years later before fulfilling her genius.