It takes stiff competition to outshine Yuja Wang, who last night at the Barbican complemented her spangled silver sheath with a disconcerting pair of shades. But the super-heroine pianist, who played Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, turned out to contribute the (comparatively) restrained and low-key element of a London Symphony Orchestra programme that culminated in a wall-shaking performance of Saint-Saëns’ "Organ" Symphony, with Anna Lapwood at the manuals.

A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first half by rising to the challenge of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” - a title he suggests, in his series of first-rate online essays about the sonatas, might be replaced more appropriately with “Titanic”?

Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.

Hauntings, memories, echoes: Antonio Pappano has started his official tenure as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra by looking back in time. Wednesday’s season opener gave us a MacMillan premiere “haunted by earlier musical spirits and memories”. Last night’s follow-up picked up the thread with the Elgar Violin Concerto – a work alive with stirrings and rustlings just out of sight, recollections that drift in and out of view, a human soul “enshrined” in its strange, otherworldly musings.

Somehow those of us required to translate the musical experience into words look for the moments which defeat us. One such was the extraordinary sound of muted first violins and cellos at the start of the second movement in Sibelius’s First Symphony last night. Pinpointing its essence feels impossible, but it could only have come from the London Symphony Orchestra’s special relationship with its new Chief Conductor Antonio Pappano.

The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.

Mahler’s Sixth is one of those apocalyptic megaliths that shouldn’t be approached too often by audiences or conductors. It’s been a constant in Simon Rattle’s treasury since 1989, when he first recorded it with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (they performed it together at the Proms in 1995) to now, when the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concerts followed a recording. Sophisticated, yes, but where was the feral intensity?

Hot on the glittering heels of the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko, Sir Simon Rattle brought another stellar German outfit to the Proms, bearing the gift of a Bruckner symphony in the composer’s 200th birthday year. With his (relatively) new team at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rattle served a polished, sophisticated and superbly played Fourth.

Never mind the Last Night, it’s always the preceding Proms weeks which lead us through different rooms of a dream palace as visiting orchestras succeed one another. This year has taken on an almost hallucinatory quality as three great conductors – Jakub Hrůša, Kirill Petrenko and Klaus Mäkelä – appeared in close succession. If the Orchestre de Paris isn’t quite on the level with the Czech or Berlin Philharmonics, its love-in with its chief conductor was still electrfying at times.

Is it because the British are wary of national sentiment from a genius that this performance of Má vlast (My Homeland) is the only major London offering in Smetana’s 200^th anniversary year? Supple movement, emotional range and unerring climaxes from Kirill Petrenko and his Berlin Phllharmonic might encourage more interest in great operas Libuše and Dalibor (which Jakub Hrůša hopes for in his Royal Opera tenure).