English music began and ended my Proms week, and loomed large in the middle. Both the main anniversary composers, Mozart and Shostakovich, were represented (impossible to find a week this season when they are not), and so was Schumann, the 150th anniversary of whose death is being marked. And I think I spotted a Proms sub-theme, that of versions. There are quite a few examples of works being given in a new edition, or realised by one composer from another’s sketches, or transcribed for orchestra, or restored to their original state.

Schumann’s fourth symphony, for example, was performed — by the Northern Sinfonia under Thomas Zehetmair — in the version in which it was completed in 1841, following on from Schumann’s first symphony. Because of an unsuccessful premiere, he shelved the piece for a decade, then revised it — notably by thickening the scoring — and presented it as the successor to his second and third symphonies. As such, it became part of the repertory, but with controversy over his competence as an orchestrator. As a continuous, integrated four-movement structure, the work has been admired for its boldness. As a listening experience, it has often been trashed. I remember hating it when I had to play it in a youth orchestra. It seemed stodgy and laborious.

Now I was hearing this familiar musical argument unfold with crisp precision and a dancing lightness. It was as though a ballet dancer had taken off a radiation-protection suit. The music’s novelty, ingenuity and even its weight, in the intellectual sense, were fully apparent, but its weight in the artificially monumental sense had at once become part of music’s long history of editorial interference.

No matter that the editor was Schumann. After his death, it was Brahms — most enlightened of editors — who prevailed over Schumann’s widow, Clara, in having this version of the symphony preserved.

That good fortune allowed Zehetmair and his brilliant colleagues to display a chamber sensitivity in re-creating Schumann’s musical thinking at his prime of life. Their account of the late Ligeti’s Ramifications for strings took subtlety into a still rarer atmosphere. As for their Brahms Violin Concerto — in which Zehetmair was soloist as well as conductor — it was a reminder that there are states of being into which only music can lead you: that blissfulness where time transcends itself; that mountain-top freshness where everything makes sense.

Such superlatives did not always come to mind. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, under its departing principal conductor, Richard Hickox, gave two programmes, the first an ill-assortment of music from Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen (it needed more flair, more flare), Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos, K365 (Till Fellner and Paul Lewis were fine contrasted soloists, but the reading was unseductive overall), and Dvorak’s Symphony No 7, which jogged along. The stately yet combustible Hickox impressed far more with his all-English evening, beginning in Elgarian inspiration — the overture In the South (Alassio) — and ending in a Waltonian blaze: Belshazzar’s Feast done in this ideal space with mainly Welsh choristers, Bryn Terfel a stentorian soloist, brass bands on high, and splendour falling on the walls.

Terfel received the Queen’s Medal for Music from the Queen herself during a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek that opened with Maxwell Davies’s A Little Birthday Music (an anthem for the Queen’s 80th birthday with Scots Guards and eight youth choirs), and brought a performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, played beautifully by the young Julian Bliss on the basset clarinet, the instrument Mozart had in mind. My week closed with a BBCSO concert under David Robertson that included the British premiere of George Benjamin’s Dance Figures: nine characterful movements written to be choreographed, but gripping as a concert work, mysteriously evoking 20th-century orchestration at its most lucid and glamorous.