There's a Gallic flavour to this week's new releases, with two unusual recordings of orchestral music played on period instruments. And there's a set of seminal 20th-century ballet scores, played by a wonderful French orchestra under their much-missed Russian principal conductor.

Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. 

Forget almost everything you thought you knew about classical music. Forget the regulations and the rigmarole, the politeness and the prissiness. Forget the preening institutions. Forget the vocal doom-sayers. Classical music is in the throes of an extremely welcome revolution. The entrepreneurial spirit that seized and transformed British art in the 1980s is finally animating and unshackling this most stubborn of art forms. Operas are springing up in warehouses, concerts in bars.

One of the weirdest things about the Proms's "weird concerto" theme is that the concertos so far haven't been all that weird. Piano. Violin. Cello and violin. Cello, piano and violin. Pretty familiar stuff. Finally last night we got something bona fide off the wall: a concerto for string quartet from French rebel Pascal Dusapin. Was it weird enough?

The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost materialised yesterday. And I'm not talking about the transcendental appearance of the Holy Trinity of News International. I'm talking Proms. Last night's two saw a geriatric performance of the Brahms double, a brand spanking new way through an old Rite and a transfiguringly spectral invocation of Schubert's Quintet.

A 20th-century Austrian symphony receives a memorable first recording, coupled with a witty, rarely played slice of Schubert. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is heard in a powerful reading recorded in the Royal Festival Hall. And we’ve an intelligent, logical coupling of two ballets commissioned by Diaghilev.

Programming a mixed bill is a very delicate art, and what seems like an interesting mix to one person might appear to be an entirely random series of choices to another. The Royal’s new triple is the perfect example. The music – Stravinsky, Poulenc, Stravinsky – might suggest an air of 1920s Parisian je ne sais quoi in theory, but in practice, that’s not how things unfold, with an odd combination of Ashton at his spiky chic-est, followed by Glen Tetley’s quasi-religious memorial meditation, and topped by Macmillan at his – well, more of that anon.

Were the great Diaghilev alive today, surely he’d be working in the imaginative possibilities of electronic technology - this was the opinion given me by the arts panjandrum, the late Sir John Drummond. And given the developments of 3D, who knows? Would it be this manipulation of our perceptions that fascinated him? 3D is certainly everywhere in dance now, though the challenge is to leap the judgment of it as merely a gimmick. I reckon while Wim Wenders’ film Pina 3D achieved that, the version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Klaus Obermaier doesn’t.

For the sheer multiplicity of event, the resplendently rich palette of sound and the incendiary aural thrill it detonates, Marius Neset's Golden Xplosion is aptly named. This second solo album from the 25-year-old Norwegian sax player and composer careens between the hyperventilated counterpoint of “City on Fire” and the glacial, slightly ECM-ish soundscape of “Epilogue”.