The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in her 90th year. Even more of a stunner to see Alonso herself sitting in the Royal Box, and coming on stage at the end to a standing ovation, tiny, chalk-white, red-lipped, with black glasses over her blind eyes, giving a remarkably deep curtsey for someone of 89.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?

From Russian “avant-garde constructivism” to Estonian minimalism via a jazz-inspired French concerto and the defiant originality of Scriabin – last night’s Prom from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra had a lot of ground to cover.

Heading up this month's classical selection is a 16-CD budget box set of the complete works of Frédéric Chopin, issued to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the consumptive Pole's birth. Plus we review a rare piano concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a disc of even rarer string orchestra works by the post-war Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, a fresh coupling of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets, a new version of Bruckner's mighty Eighth from the French-Canadian wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin and two sets of historic recordings conducted by "Glorious John" Barbirolli.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Valery Gergiev shimmying his way through Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. There he was, London’s loosest-limbed maestro, back on the Barbican podium (just about) with the London Symphony Orchestra, after a summer flogging his chaotic Ring Cycle around the globe, returning to more favourable ground, an all-French programme of Debussy, Dutilleux and Ravel that had his dancing juices flowing and his legs a-leaping. Certainly, there’s no gainsaying his moves. The question is were they being put to good musical effect?