After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could trust Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin army of generals to turn in any amount of subtle colours.

The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. And if ever music replicated the excited buzz of something in the air Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique did, raising the curtain almost imperceptively through the scurrying of muted strings and surprised woodwind punctuations.

This was the most eagerly anticipated programme of the Mariinsky visit - something old, something borrowed and something new. The old, that colourful fairytale of Stravinsky’s lush, melodious youth, The Firebird; the new, a recent acquisition by the Londoners’ favourite Russian, Alexei Ratmansky; and the borrowed, something from English ballet legend, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, once kept under glass with the Fonteyn and Nureyev myths, but eventually released from the museum by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche a decade ago.

After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20^th century monsters.

Jorge Grundman: A Mortuis Resurgere Susana Cordón (soprano), Brodsky Quartet (Chandos)

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.

A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captures the pulsing terror of seasonal change, the relentless onward drive of nature that brings death closer even as life burns at its most ferocious. The 1913 première of the ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky infamously caused a riot in its Parisian audience. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s version for his company Fabulous Beast has terrifying dog heads and men furiously humping the ground.

With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask from the French Institute’s two-and-a-half day festival? Well, perhaps a better and bigger Steinway. The one that can now transform the cinema into a concert hall, and instigated the first It's All About Piano! weekend last year needed bags of restoration, and given the obstinately dull middle register you have to ask, was it worth it?

Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through.