Coram Boy is a thrilling story of dead babies, teenage love, material greed and the redeeming power of music. This is Christmas entertainment that packs a powerful punch, borne aloft by the inspiring sound of Handel’s Messiah, with horrific events presented on stage, an emotional rollercoaster ride that is definitely not for the very young or the faint of heart.

It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.

Honegger: Une cantate de Noël, Pastorale d’été, Symphony No 4 London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, New London Childrens’ Choir/Jurowski (LPO)

Fauré: Requiem Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Järvi, with Philippe Jaroussky (counter tenor), Matthias Goerne (baritone) (Virgin Classics)

Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force.

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”.

Mendelssohn loved looking back. And nowhere more so than in his blockbuster oratorio, Elijah. But what was most striking about last night's monumental performance at the Proms was how much he was also clearly looking forward and outward, and how feeble an appellation oratorio seemed to be for what we were witnessing. We were being bombarded with pre-echoes of the adventure-laden Hollywood epics of the 1950s. We were being hit by a microclimate of such unstable energy that it could easily have registered on the Beaufort Scale. Prototype movie. Tropical hurricane.

“The text of Britain’s teaching, the message of the free…”. No, not the Last Night of the Proms or the Olympic Games ahead of time. This is the final chorus of Elgar’s concert-length cantata Caractacus, which was given a vigorous work-out in this star concert of the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral under Sir Andrew Davis.

From Middle-earth, middle England and Nibelheim they came, adventurers anxious to acclaim an Unjustly Neglected British Masterpiece. Praise, or curse, their persistence in steering the BBC and the Albert Hall back to Havergal Brian's biggest work after 31 years; hail by all means conductor Martyn Brabbins's flexible command of nine choirs and two orchestras. All I can say is that before I sat through nearly two long hours of continuous music last night, I proclaimed that this was exactly the sort of thing the Proms should be trying.

The creative seed, once planted, can take a long time to germinate and come into bloom – in this case 37 years. For Victoria Wood, 1974 was a seminal year – she turned 21, she won New Faces and she saw a Thames TV documentary about the Manchester Children’s Choir who famously sang Purcell’s "Nymphs and Shepherds" with the Halle under Sir Hamilton Harty in the Free Trade Hall. That recording, featuring 250 children from 50 Manchester schools, was in 1929 and the resulting 78rpm Columbia record became an unexpected hit, selling a million copies.