At the end of another Prom season - the Last Night, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington, was last night - I find myself pondering what summers would be like without this great institution, and how it would be if instead of two months of daily concerts at the Albert Hall (often two a night) and all the chamber recitals and talks, we had a stretch of nearly nothing in the classical way. There would be Mostly Mozart at the Barbican, some outdoor opera and the odd church concert, but the disappearance, not just of regular good music but of a whole climate of aesthetic and educational inquiry, would be hard to bear. Thanks to the BBC and the licence fee, the world’s greatest music festival returns each year and is easily taken for granted; though, for some people, the recurrence is an overriding reason for living in London.

Not that one can’t hear every Prom on Radio 3 and watch a considerable number on BBC4, BBC2 and even BBC1. But there is nothing like being inside that amphitheatre, where, for all the chanciness of the acoustics, one’s involvement with the music is somehow more intense and intimate than elsewhere. Though most of the concerts I attended had a teeming audience – much larger and seemingly more diversified than winter-season ones at the Festival Hall and Barbican – there was always the sense, created by the concentric layout of the seats and the presence of standees in the arena, of being at a soirée in which people cluster round a piano to hear a marvellous player. In terms of creating a radiant and productive concert atmosphere, the Albert Hall really does square the circle.

Of course, what matters are the programmes themselves, and this season certainly saw some unusual ones, often long or comprising a single work. The performance by the London Symphony Orchestra and a hugely authoritative Valery Gergiev of Tchaikovsky’s complete (177minute) score for his Sleeping Beauty ballet was a season high-light for me, as was the three-part concert by the Gürzenich Orchestra under Markus Stenz. Beginning with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which they premiered under him in Cologne in 1904, and of which, for Stenz, they gave a fascinatingly inventive rendition (the central scherzo animated by restless rubato, the adagietto wholly resisting sentimental lyricism), they went on to a rare, brilliant early work, Punkte, by that long-term Cologne resident Stockhausen, and ended with Schubert songs arranged by living composers, and the parting shot of an overture, Beethoven’s Leonore No 3. The strange, three-hour programme could have been a disaster, but it was sublime.

The final double-interval concert was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins, opening with the last (apart from brief Sea Songs on the Last Night) of the season’s anniversary tributes to Vaughan Williams: a performance of his Sinfonia Antartica. Before that, the last of the 17 Messiaen centenary tributes, and the grandest of the season’s single-work programmes, took the form of a concert performance by Netherlands Opera of his solitary stage piece, Saint François d’Assise, which runs for four hours. The audience for this event was not among the larger ones and seemed oddly male-dominated, but it evinced a well-nigh religious attentiveness and was rewarded with a performance under Ingo Metzmacher of quite lacerating precision and power: an astounding display of orchestral iridescence and explosiveness. Rod Gilfry heroically sustained the sapping title role, and Heidi Grant Murphy was a rapturous, vocally immaculate high-soprano Angel.

Two appearances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Bernard Haitink, lent glamour to the final week. They undertook enormous symphonies – Mahler’s sixth, Shosta-kovich’s fourth – and gave the European premiere of Chicago Remains, a Carl Sandburg-inspired, solidly achieved tone-poem by one of their composers-in-residence, Mark-Anthony Turnage. The Mahler revealed them to be among the truly wonderful ensembles. They made the most ravishing, best-projected string sound that I heard; their brass were a uniquely golden blaze. The andante came after the scherzo, which seemed right, but the finale’s third hammer blow was (superstitiously?) omitted, which seemed wrong. But Haitink was magisterial.

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