Antony & the Johnsons’ melancholy songs of love and loss, steeped in a contemporary classical aesthetic, lend themselves to the full orchestral treatment. There is also something theatrical about the singer’s delivery, not so much high opera hysterics as more subtle explorations of the darker ranges of human emotion. Cut the World brings together live orchestral versions of a number of Antony’s best tracks drawn from his four studio albums.

Pavel Novák is a composer I know something about because he has been much played by the Schubert Ensemble, who were for a time resident at Cardiff University, where I teach. But broadly speaking his music is virtually unknown in the UK. When William Howard played these 24 Preludes and Fugues in St Giles' Cripplegate four years ago, hardly anyone came to hear them – perhaps not surprisingly. Obscure Czech piano music in a chilly City church in December is hardly the most enticing prospect. But now that Howard has made a brilliant, compelling recording of this 75-minute cycle, its composer’s British reputation might (or should) expand.

It’s not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England’s greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of aphorisms and expostulations, with a fair smattering of historical grandees thrown in for good measure. That this production is a two-hander is no impediment to appearances from Joshua Reynolds, Flora MacDonald, the Prince Regent and Oliver Goldsmith (“He goes on without knowing how he is to get off”), not forgetting Johnson’s beloved cat Hodge.

Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go to elaborate lengths to prove that their statements of the bloody obvious are objectively correct.

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.

Dominated by a focus on contemporary music, this year’s Proms’ Saturday Matinees have also developed something of a heavenward glance as the series has progressed. Last weekend it was the Christian mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen at the fore, with Britten’s Sacred and Profane providing a slippery foothold in the earthly. Yesterday we cast off worldly shackles entirely, gazing beyond the limits of our own humanity in the musical visions of Tippett, Tavener and Sofia Gubaidulina.

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.

After three days' motoring and clambering around the most awesome natural landscapes I've ever seen, how could a mere concert hall in a city the size of Cambridge begin to compare?

Twelfth-century abbess, healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen had no formal musical training. Perhaps because of this her music – exquisite arabesques of chant melody, animated by the conviction of her religious beliefs – creates a language all its own, a “swaying bridge between heaven and earth”, as she characterised it.

A young American composer's work is showcased by a major label and doesn't disappoint. A classy British horn player enjoys teaming up with a pianist and a flautist. And an impressive cycle of 20th-century symphonies gets a welcome airing, thanks to a hard-working London orchestra and their principal conductor.