Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked two of Irish National Opera’s Vivaldi specials in the Linbury Theatre – one a major award winner – and the best Messiah I’ve ever heard in the Wigmore Hall. Their first Prom was pure celebration, and how they filled the Royal Albert Hall, both collectively and solo-wise, in the revised Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast.

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than seven of them this year, three on Saturdays and four on Sundays. And yet, strangely, for this programme, mainly consisting of works for concert band, it did genuinely seem like the right time of day.

This week Vladimir Putin tried to murder my hosts in Ukraine. He failed. In more hopeful days, I spoke at a seminar organised by the British Council’s branch in Kyiv. Its offices (along with the EU delegation) felt the force of a Russian missile strike on Wednesday night. No one died there, thankfully, although 23 more civilians in the city perished. 

Does the orchestra that sways together play together? Quite apart from their (reliably gorgeous) sound, the tight-packed strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig made quite a sight at the Proms as they collectively surged through key passages of Dvořák and Sibelius as if staging a succession of seated Mexican waves. 

How often is an orchestral concert perfect in every texture, every instrumental entry, every phrase? Wednesday's Phiharmonia Prom struck sound-spectrum gold, but its chief conductor, Santtu Matias Rouvali, could do with more humanity. My colleague Rachel Halliburton found his fellow Finn Klaus Mäkelä challenging in Mahler’s Fifth on Saturday night, but on Sunday afternoon neither he nor his fellow musicians put a foot wrong; indeed, feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

Klaus Mäkelä teased out all the fragility and the sense of impending mortality in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, revealing a vision that was as intricate as it was quietly luminous. Famously Mahler almost died from an intestinal haemorrhage in the year that he started composing the work, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s sensitive, nuanced performance conveyed his heightened awareness of a world that could suddenly disappear without warning.

Handel probably wrote his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in 1707 while he was in the service of the Marquis of Ruspoli in Rome. It tells the story of the shepherdess, Clori, who has two lovers that she plays off against one another to no great effect, everything culminating in an ending that’s suspiciously neat even by Handel’s standards.

Pianist Bruce Liu wasn’t the only star soloist last night, though he certainly had the most notes to play. Attention was riveted by at least five Philharmonia members and their maverick principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali as percussionist in a joyful Prom.

For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by its shimmering fjords and austere mountains, he found the text to be an intoxicating affirmation of the glories of the world in a humanistic universe.

There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to hear them.