The death knell of classical music has been rung so frequently during the 30 or so years since I started writing about it that, nowadays, I just laugh into my tub of popcorn. Anyone attending the BBC Proms in the past fortnight will have seen a live art form in the rudest of health: in an unbroken sequence of six evenings spent at the Albert Hall, only Handel’s Samson, a midweek four-hour marathon, and the late-night chamber concert by members of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra had significant numbers of empty seats, and even these concerts would have filled the Festival or Barbican halls.

Admittedly, it was a vintage week in terms of Roger Wright’s overall programming, and blissfully free of themes or “threads” — Darwin and the ubiquitous anniversary composers barely got a look-in. Apart from late-night Mendelssohn, Handel was the exception, and the half-empty arena made me ponder again whether the Handel bubble may have finally burst. Samson is a masterpiece, but a very long one, and I did wonder if more cuts should have been sanctioned by the English Concert’s reverential conductor, Harry Bicket. The performance was definitely worth attending, for Mark Padmore’s commanding, angry Samson, Susan Gritton’s sensuous Dalila, Iestyn Davies’s luminous Micah, and Lucy Crowe, rounding off the evening with a gleaming, effortless Let the Bright Seraphim, the number everyone was waiting for.

Barenboim’s band of Jewish and Muslim musicians — co-founded 10 years ago with the Palestinian Edward Said — staged a mini residency: one “straight” symphonic programme, an opera in concert (Beethoven’s symbolic freedom opera, Fidelio) the above-mentioned late-night pairing of Mendelssohn’s Octet with Berg’s Chamber Concerto, and a “Proms Intro” at the nearby Royal College of Music, in which Barenboim introduced two pieces by his friend Pierre Boulez.

Barenboim’s energy seems limitless, and what he has achieved with his remarkable young orchestra in 10 years of summer camps and tours is something very special indeed. The purely orchestral programme crowned beautifully played accounts of Liszt’s most popular tone poem, Les préludes, and the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It featured a rollercoaster performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, with a heart-rending shepherd (cor anglais) in the Scène aux champs and terrifying judgment day bells in the Witches’ Sabbath.

The Fidelio, with an English narration by Said, spoken and pre-recorded by the evening’s Leonore, Waltraud Meier, was greater than the sum of its parts. Meier is, essentially, a mezzo, and she lunges hopefully at the high Bs of the part, but her visionary presence and eloquent declamation counts for a lot in this opera. If her colleagues — John Tomlinson’s now veteran-sounding Rocco, Gerd Grochowski’s Pizarro, Simon O’Neill’s nasal yet musical Florestan, Adriana Kucherova’s vocally tired Marzelline — weren’t exactly A-list casting, the orchestra’s contribution was world class. They were thrilling in the Leonore III overture, placed at the beginning of the evening, and, with the chorus, in the optimistic finale. The symbolic integrity of this orchestra and Beethoven’s message of universal freedom overrode any passing vocal flaws.

Two of Shostakovich’s greatest symphonies interpreted by Russian-born conductors framed my week: the Eleventh and the Eighth, the respective climaxes of a BBC Symphony Orchestra programme under Semyon Bychkov and of the LSO’s second visit to the Proms, this time with its principal maestro, Valery Gergiev. I have always thought of the Eighth — one of the composer’s angry, lamenting, bitter wartime symphonies — as one of Shostakovich’s greatest, but, well played as it was, it frequently sounded banal, especially when preceded by a monstrous piece of kitsch, Schnittke’s short but overblown student oratorio, Nagasaki, written in 1958 and sounding more like a birthday song to Krushchev than a protest against nuclear war.

Bychkov’s account of the Eleventh, on the other hand, was one of the most electrifying and shattering I have heard of a Shostakovich symphony in the concert hall, and the BBCSO responded to his visionary direction with playing they seem to reserve for very special conductors. From the glacial evocation of the Winter Palace courtyard, via the shooting of the 1905 revolutionaries by the Tsar’s armed guard, to the climactic sounding of the tocsin, Bychkov never let the tension sag and was rewarded with a tumultuous, spontaneous ovation from both audience and orchestra. What a great conductor he has become.

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