This year’s BBC Proms season is the last planned in its entirety by Nicholas Kenyon, who departs to replace John Tusa at the Barbican Centre in September. It is too early to anticipate what his successor, Radio 3’s controller, Roger Wright, might change, but the auguries are mixed. Wright is both a predictable and somewhat baffling choice: predictable because Radio 3 controllers get the Proms job as night follows day; baffling because his claim to notoriety at the BBC’s predominantly classical station has been to banish expensive live broadcasts from the schedules – most “live” concerts are now heard in deferred relays – and the Proms are all about live broadcasting. What price next year’s Last Night of the Proms as a 2008 Christmas special?

Kenyon has been in his BBC job since 1996, which means he has been programming the Proms for perhaps two years longer than is healthy. Some of the programmes between the splashy opening weekend and the glitzy international orchestra-fest of the last 10 days in August and September have a slight look of fatigue about them, so maybe it’s time for a new pair of eyes and ears at the helm. Apart from his “no women composers” gaffe of 2006, Kenyon has an unblemished record as director; he has maintained standards and enhanced the media profile of the Proms by means of eye-catching innovations without resorting to wholesale dumbing-down. Anybody who can programme Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia with Rossini’s Stabat Mater and get an audience of more than 3,000 can’t be accused of populism. He has a great sense of humour, too.

The Berio/Rossini pairing came courtesy of the Chorus and Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, making a first appearance since the Royal Opera’s Antonio Pappano took over as maestro direttore in 2005. Possibly Italy’s most renowned symphonic institution, it has never really broken into the ranks of the international elite, but that could change under Pappano, whose brand of Italianate operatic lyricism is well matched to the transparency and Mediterranean brio of the Accademia’s playing.

This was a canny piece of programming: two big pieces by Italian composers, the recently deceased (2003) Berio’s Sinfonia of 1969 coupled with Rossini’s choral masterpiece of 1841. It was fascinating to hear how these works have fared over time: the Sinfonia, with its Mahler-scherzo mock-up – the musical equivalent of painting over the moustache of the Laughing Cavalier – and its “aleatoric” vocal commentary for the Swingle Singers, is beginning to sound like a period piece, while Rossini’s once derided Stabat Mater has never before, in my experience, seemed such an important piece, the only genuine precursor to Verdi’s great Requiem. Rossini’s standing as a serious composer is at an all-time high, and this was reflected in Pappano’s grand reading, the opulent playing of the orchestra, the superb choral singing and a fine quartet of soloists, from whom Joyce DiDonato stood out for immaculate style and beauty of tone.

The soloists saved the day on the First Night: a programme of Walton (Portsmouth Point), Elgar (Cello Concerto) and Beethoven (Choral Symphony). This was one of those business-as-usual, let’s-get-on-with-the-job evenings, courtesy of the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Jiri Belohlavek. After polite Walton, undercharacterised Elgar – surely the BBC could have come up with a bigger personality than the former principal cellist Paul Watkins, in this of all pieces, in this of all years (Elgar’s 150th birthday)? – and bog-standard Beethoven for three movements, René Pape’s resounding bass jolted us out of catatonia with the most thrilling O Freunde I have heard in the concert hall. He seemed to inspire his colleagues, Maria Haan, Patricia Bardon and Paul Groves, the BBC Symphony and Philharmonia Choruses.

For sheer variety, at least, the opening weekend of the Proms has had few recent peers. On the first Saturday, there was British film music, presented by Richard E Grant, with a special guest appearance by Richard Attenborough to introduce music from Shadowlands and the Dam Busters. Later, Alice Coote sang a gorgeous recital of English songs, with a repeat of Judith Weir’s exquisite “cycle” The Voice of Desire, a BBC commission for the 2003 Proms.

The undoubted highlight of the opening weekend, however, was last Sunday’s all-French baroque evening, beginning with André Campra’s serene Requiem, performed by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under their founder-director, John Eliot Gardiner. In the exhilarating second half, they shared the podium and part of the arena with two dance companies and the remarkable Buskaid Soweto String Project, directed by Rosemary Nalden in a programme of vocal and dance extracts from Rameau operas.

This could have been an exercise in political correctness, but the playing and dancing were so full of verve and raw energy, they had the audience clapping rhythmically by the end, and the seated parts of the auditorium rose to their feet. The Last Night had come eight weeks early, and with much better music.

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