Esa-Pekka Salonen and his dauntless band of Philharmonia players have been wrestling with heroes. After a celebration of Wagner's Tristan, the legend-making shifted further north last night. Here was Sibelius first as the plain-singing, well-loved bard of Finnish endurance and then as the startlingly original creator of a musical alter ego in the shape of mythical adventurer Lemminkäinen. Salonen's edge-of-seat interpretation made two things startlingly clear: that the four movements of the misnamed Lemminkäinen Suite can constitute as radical a symphony as any of Sibelius's numbered seven, and that this surging orchestral tidal wave is as iconoclastic a work in its own rugged way as Wagner's opera.

"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?

Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's brilliant music director Stéphane Denève. I now hunger for concert performances here conducted by Denève of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and James MacMillan's The Sacrifice. On the evidence of the late-night Prom's box of delights, I even uncharacteristically want to hear all of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso with Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as the stars.

One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's brilliant music director Stéphane Denève. I now hunger for concert performances here conducted by Denève of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and James MacMillan's The Sacrifice. On the evidence of the late-night Prom's box of delights, I even uncharacteristically want to hear all of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso with Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as the stars.

Call me a paradoxically wary old Mahler nut, but I reckon that given 24 months of anniversary overkill, it might keep things fresh to catch each of the symphonies live no more than once a year. So, having heard an Everest of a First Symphony from Abbado in Lucerne last August, I thought Rattle's might be the team likeliest to do this far-from-beginner's symphony similar justice. Did its Proms Mahler One compare well with the Swiss festival love-in?

Australia has many fine exports – wine, women, gap year anecdotes – but increasingly it is her orchestras that are setting the standard. With a magnificent Proms performance from the Australian Youth Orchestra still fresh in the ears (as well as a significantly reinvigorated Sydney Symphony courtesy of Ashkenazy), last night it was the turn of the smaller and still-deadlier Australian Chamber Orchestra to fly the national flag, in what may well prove to be the finest concert of the summer.

Boy, did I want to enjoy this Prom. On paper it should have been the highlight of the season. Young Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been making his mark in London as principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra with several sensational performances of Bruckner over the past few years. Here he was for his Proms debut at the helm of his smart new orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic (Gergiev's old outfit).

If the bust of Sir Henry Wood that watches over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall had come to life, Commendatore-like, during last night’s concert, I can’t help feel that he would have been smiling. Beethoven nights – once a popular Proms fixture – have lately fallen off the calendar, but alongside various nods to tradition have this year returned. Following Jiří Bělohlávek and Paul Lewis’s recent concerto-fest, Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen last night presented a second all-Beethoven programme.