Pianist Mitsuko Uchida's concentration, calm and grace under pressure are an inspiration. Towards the end of the first piece on her programme, played to a packed Royal Festival Hall last night, the quiet but insistent high-pitched screech of a fire alarm kept going off. Low voices on walkie-talkies at the entrances to the hall were also audible. Whatever the confusion they were sharing with each other, they were failing to lift it.

The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.

“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement.

The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic.

All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont.

We all love a good guitar riff and so a whole hour devoted to this one simple pleasure sounds like a surefire hit. BBC Four is the go-to channel for the rock‘n’roll documentary and this latest offering boasted a dazzling line-up including Brian May, Tony Iommi and Johnny Marr. 

In the year of his 85th birthday, and his 60th season as a conductor, Bernard Haitink is hardly taking it easy, with concerts with various orchestras around Europe and the US including an appearance at the Proms. In this visit to London with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe he may not have been bounding up the steps to the stage, but his powers with the baton remain undimmed.

"Finally,” said Sir Simon Rattle, “I get a chance to say thank you. We have had forty years working together without an argument." The Royal Philharmonic Society was awarding an Honorary Membership to Martin Campbell-White, Rattle's agent. Campbell-White, who has been a guiding influence on the conductor's career since the 1970's made a rare appearance on stage, as he became the first artist manager ever to win this award in the RPS's 201-year history. 

Antonio Pappano addressed the audience before the start of the concert to explain the thinking behind this rather unusual programme, first performed in the early nineties and now a perfect fit for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus, where he has been music director since 2005.