Having been away in remote mountain places, I hadn't heard that the BBCSO's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek was taking a month off to recover from a virus. So it was a bracing last-minute shock to find the man stepping up to the podium to conduct Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude not the orchestra's wise Hans Sachs but a Walther von Stolzing in conducting terms, tipped unexpectedly by one source outside the BBC as Bělohlávek's successor. Lean and hungry Dane Thomas Dausgaard masterminded the most brilliantly co-ordinated Prom I heard last year, and he excelled again last night. As the programme's central cabinet of curiosities did not.

Older pianomanes may lament the passing of the great Russian schooling that gave us the likes of Sofronitsky, Yudina and Richter. I'm not so sure. The younger generations may have dropped the mystic torch, but their more even-tempered approach can beguile. Yevgeny Sudbin forms the current holy trinity with Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Lugansky. His latest Wigmore recital was revelatory, not always in a good way; that broad beam needn't have swept every corner of the broad Russian church he so singularly constructed in the programme's second half. But anyone who can make Liszt sound as lucid as Haydn is unique.

The world tour that the Proms offer this year touches down in no more fascinating musical country than Hungary, with three of its great composers, Liszt, Bartók and Kodály brought into the Albert Hall last night by the ever-stimulating Vladimir Jurowski with his hot gypsy band, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one hinted at in the George Herbert words, if hardly the Judith Weir music, of the opening BBC commission, Stars, Night, Music and Light. Though spattered with Messiaenic orchestral paint - not to mention the obbligato sniffalong from my annoying neighbour - it felt like a very tame, rather olde-British gambit.

This week’s reviews include a generous Liszt anthology played by one of the 20th century’s most fondly remembered pianists. There’s a reissued box of Beethoven symphonies performed on modern instruments by one of the classiest European orchestras. Heading further north, we've a repackaged set of Sibelius symphonies with some essential extras.

What next - Boulez and Daniel Barenboim in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? The two numbered Liszt concertos are probably as far as they're going to go in lacier romantic repertoire, and last night it didn't feel far enough to justify the predictable standing ovation.

For last year's Europe Day concert, presidency-holder Spain fielded a Paco Peña showstopper in what's for the past three years been the venue of choice, St John's, Smith Square. This 9 May, the Hungarians' six-month stint yielded not a wow-factor spectacular - for me, that would have been a knees-up with violinist Gaby Lakatos - but instead a worthy and far from dull celebration of the Liszt bicentenary with 13-year-old Ferenc/Franz's one-act opera, Don Sanche.

Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas.