Where would we be without the Proms? Speaking for myself, I would miss these intellectual summers terri-bly. To be able to go each night for two months to a concert nearly always by a distinguished orchestra, sometimes twice a night, is a luxury that soon becomes an addiction, a habit not easily fed elsewhere. But I think I’m speaking for thousands of others, too. Most nights, the Albert Hall is packed, and the arena, where tickets are £5, jostling. A Swiss critic, accustomed to the pricing of the Lucerne festival, a summer concert series not unlike the Proms, but dressy and exclusive, was unable to believe this. And I barely can. For little more than the price of an interval drink, you can hear the revered Claudio Abbado conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in Mahler’s immense Third Symphony. Pay again and you get the incomparable Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Bruckner’s immense Eighth. Standing in the arena also gives the best acoustic angle in an atmospheric but unpredictable building.

This is beginning to sound like advertising copy, but the Proms really are among the outstanding achievements of British society, a palpable cultural utopia. They attract an enormous (worldwide) audience to programmes that are admittedly diverse – Cleo Laine, Nitin Sawhney and, mysteriously, Michael Ball had showcase evenings – but overwhelmingly concentrated on the most exalted level of achievement. There could not be a better illustration of high seriousness as a way of life. And each concert is a verbal as well as musical experience. The programme notes are thorough and learned, but never stuffy: David Gutman contributes considered discographies and reading lists every time, and David Harman sifts the archive for previous Prom performances of each work. There’s a caffeine dose of stimulus to be had from almost any Prom, and the whole venture is, in short, so admirable, I’m amazed some powerful lobby is not trying to wrest it from us.

Of course, there is room for criticism: the programming and ambience have both attracted a fair amount. Perhaps we cannot expect each of 72 programmes to be a crafted jewel, and it was certainly exasperating that the concert shared by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra should have a second half dominated by the vacuity of Telemann’s Overture in G minor, when the compelling vocal soloists, Kate Royal and Ian Bostridge, were allowed only a song each and two duets. Unsatisfactory, too, was the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s programme with Jiri Belohlavek, in which Britten’s Peter Grimes interludes and Martinu’s Piano Concerto No 4 may have been linked by having had premieres here – “Prom firsts” are a theme this season – but clashed as glittering inspiration and mediocre glitter are bound to do, the fine pianist Ivo Kahanek notwithstanding.

Much fuss was made about the supposedly timid shunting, by the director, Nicholas Kenyon, of another Prom first, Birtwistle’s rambunctious (1995) Last Night of the Proms commission, Panic, into a late-night slot, but nobody noted that it is far from the composer’s best piece. And I myself have joined in the carping over the audience’s tendency to clap between movements. In fact, this, along with the acoustics, has become less of a problem. As the orchestras grow ever more illustrious, the Proms are like an ascent to musical nirvana. There was hardly any clapping during Abbado’s transcendent Mahler, none at all in Haitink’s Bruckner. These were performances to lift one high above distractions. It is perhaps absurd to want to choose between them.

Yet, in the end, Abbado’s account, fabulously disciplined and detailed though it was, fell victim to an ideological view: his Mahler 3 was incongruously death-haunted, realised too often in pianissimi one could barely hear, melancholy even in the jaunty fifth movement (the bimm-bamm boys were the Trinity Boys’ Choir), the slow finale spectral rather than ardent. It was Haitink, with his unselfconscious mastery, who served the music and the music alone. This was a performance of the most heart-warming refinement and vitality, deeply probing yet with a golden splendour.

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