Haitink’s magical Mahler Prom made up for the BBC’s gruesome coverage of the First Night

A dance of death or a song of life? This question, posed but never answered, haunts Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, written in bleak circumstances: his young daughter had died, he had lost his conducting job in antisemitic Vienna, his wife was giving him trouble and he had heart disease. Today he would be called “stressed out”. But the 49-year-old composer doggedly took to his hut in the Tyrolean mountains and drafted, in the summer of 1909, this sprawling, tender masterpiece, his last completed symphony.

It proved the sombre highlight of the first week of the BBC Proms 2009, in a spellbinding account by Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra. Slow, majestic and tightly controlled, the performance ran for nearly 100 minutes – longer than average but worth the amplitude for the intensity achieved. This was the Proms at their best: top musicians giving their all in front of a capacity crowd with barely a cough or a fidget. Even without the aid of a fourth plinth, the stalwart Prommers standing in the hot arena turned themselves into statues.

The Ninth has a quality of distillation, as if the emotional flesh and bones of Mahler’s youth has been reduced to music of transparent purity. At times it was like listening in slow motion. Harmonies shift, not abruptly or jaggedly but gradually, like a drop of dye dissipating through water. Often the piccolo (played by the LSO’s animated Sharon Williams) is the instigator, piercing the existing harmony with a long, sour dissonance and forcing change.

As ever with Haitink, analytical precision won the day. No fudging, no blurry wash of sound, no feverish swell. Each orchestral solo was vivid. The ever-prominent second violins ushered in the opening Andante and the subsequent Ländler with shining resonance. Haitink plays it cool and bare. This can frustrate those who give themselves up to a Mahler symphony as if entering a purple tunnel of love and pain, hoping for empathy and therapy. This would be anathema to Haitink. He demands that you leave your ego at home and use your ears: the wordless elegy is the more memorable for it. At 80, this Dutch maestro begins to look frail. We must treasure him.

Wednesday’s Cambridge University at 800 Prom had bad advance publicity. What was it for? Why not celebrate more of the current wave of excellent Cambridge-trained composers – George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Thomas Adès, Jonathan Dove? When is Loughborough or Warwick getting its own Prom? Why was it so late starting and ending and what the heck was Saint-Saëns’s swaggering and sentimental “Organ” Symphony doing there? If you gave the answer “because he has an honorary degree” in your Tripos exams, you’d end up with a Third.

Certainly the concert was a rum event, a triumph of lost opportunity but not without its glories. Five combined Cambridge choirs, including King’s and St John’s, performed Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs with Simon Keenlyside as the ardent soloist. Short, ethereal choral works by Jonathan Harvey (Come, Holy Ghost) and Judith Weir (Ascending into Heaven) were reminders of the importance of this university’s vital, unparalleled tradition of teaching compo sition, now apparently – according to the current professor Robin Holloway – under threat.

The poetic Harvey, fiercely difficult but outstandingly sung, was conducted by Andrew Nethsingha. Weir’s piece, directed by Stephen Cleobury and with organ accompaniment, had delicious buoyancy, as if the heavenly ascent was powered by a celestial waltzing Wurlitzer. A new work by Ryan Wigglesworth – an Oxford graduate; who ever said this event was not eclectic? – made a powerful impression, incisively played by the BBC SO. The Genesis of Secrecy demonstrated this young conductor-composer’s gift for exquisite orchestral colour. Wigglesworth is also, I am duty bound to report, a bit of a dish.

More choral pleasure was offered by Monday’s first lunchtime Chamber Music Prom at Cadogan Hall, when the Cardinall’s Musick excelled in unaccompanied works from the time of Henry VIII. But the season had opened messily, at least for those of us who watched the First Night on BBC2. The experience was gruesome. Neither the adorable Clive Anderson, presenting, nor his “celeb” guest Stephen Fry in the red-plush Albert Hall box, can do wrong. Yet their discussion of Fry’s weight-loss, with the orchestra tuning up in the background, was downright surreal. Why not get Jordan along to discuss her embonpoint? No knowledge of music required.

Ailish Tynan and Alice Coote, attractive and spirited soprano and mezzo, were soloists in Bruckner’s Psalm 150 and Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody. Shooting in close-up from under their chins made them look like sweaty all-in wrestlers. If a camera angle can be classified as actionable, this is surely it. Elsewhere the lens showed exhausting signs of OCD, flicking and darting as if hunting the ball on Centre Court. The harder you try to make music on the small screen “interesting”, the more tedious it gets. I checked with my usual TV-watching, music-loving research team: a teenager and an octogenarian. What did they think? They’d both switched off in squirming embarrassment.

Telly detritus – cameras, furry microphones, trailing cables – filled the stage for Opera Holland Park’s updating of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. We were in contemporary America – the work is set in Boston – with stars and stripes and power-dressing women. Director Martin Lloyd-Evans and designer Jamie Vartan alas seem to have forgotten what they learned two years ago in OHP’s stunning L’amore dei tre Re. Whereas there the action was disturbingly concentrated, here it was strewn confusingly across the wide stage. Despite Peter Robinson’s focused and perceptive conducting and, on a chilly night, the resilient skills of the City of London Sinfonia, the twains rarely met.

But there’s an urgent reason to see this show: the cast, which includes Olafur Sigurdarson, Gail Pearson and Rafael Rojas, indisposed on the first night but heroically replaced (from the pit) by David Rendall, has exciting style and panache. Together with the small, lusty chorus, they bring Verdi’s masterpiece to passionate life. The jewel is the assured, gleaming Amelia of Amanda Echalaz. Holland Park has nurtured this South African soprano, who was last year’s Tosca. She has power, looks and charisma. With work scheduled for houses throughout the world, Echalaz surely heads for stardom. Any performer who can make you forget your freezing extremities deserves the highest reward. An honorary degree maybe.