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[Thomas Dausgaard]'s riveting way of embodying a rhythm was even more evident in the two Schumann pieces that book-ended the concert. The single movement from the unfinished G minor symphony was grippingly strange, and the great Second Symphony absolutely leapt off the page. It's true Schumann does get very obsessed with a single rhythm in the opening movement, but here that just seemed like joie de vivre. And in case I'm giving the impression Dausgaard only does exuberance, the long curving arches of the slow movement were wonderful, too.

In Berlioz's Les Nuits d'ete, Nina Stemme brought an aptly veiled quality to her singing of Le Spectre de la Rose, while the spare contrapuntal textures were beautifully realised. The emptiness of life without the beloved was poignantly evoked in the following songs, both by the lean instrumental forces and by Stemme, whose dark tonal colouring and keen response to the text captured the underlying melancholy to perfection.

THE centrepiece of this three-hour concert by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra was the British premiere of a century-old work by one of its compatriots, Rued Langgaard. Music of the Spheres, completed in 1918, has, like the rest of Langgaard's voluminous output, lain abandoned until fairly recently, and it is largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the conductor Thomas Dausgaard that its oddness is now being reassessed. Nor was his prescience, emphasised here by the inclusion in the programme of several short choral pieces by Gyorgy Ligeti. No wonder Ligeti apparently saw the score of Music of the Spheres and realised that his own avant-garde techniques had already been foreseen by Langgaard.

Where [Langgaard] scatters musical seeds in all directions, Sibelius's Fifth Symphony lets them grow organically. The Danes' taut intensity made the final thunderous chords feel like bracing slaps in the face. [Thomas Dausgaard]'s generous programme included Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, soloist Henning Kragerrud eschewing powerhouse showboating in favour of modest volume levels that brought listeners to the edge of their seats. If the final movement's breakneck speeds resulted in some sketchy passages, the throaty tone of Kragerrud's violin provided ample compensation.

Perhaps the strangest of all these musical visions is Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, which is about to receive its British premiere at the Proms. It is described in the preface to the score as a \"celestial and earthly music from red glowing strings, on which life plays with claws of a beast of prey - life, with a crown of iris on its marble face and the stereotypical - yet living - demonic smile on its lily-white cheeks...\" You could imagine the composer of that as some potsmoking and brothelfrequenting chum of Aubrey Beardsley. In fact Langgaard was in many ways deeply conservative, and spent his later years as a church organist in the provincial town of Ribe in Denmark. He was a colossally prolific composer, with 431 works to his name, including 16 symphonies, and in his youth was hailed as a prodigy and the natural successor to the great Danish symphonist Carl Nielsen. \"The dark or evil side of existence is present in the sound of timpani, which Langgaard uses in a completely new way, playing chords and glissandi,\" says [Thomas Dausgaard], \"and often we hear the light and dark together, but spatially separated. Langgaard was a great pioneer in the use of space, and this is why I think the Albert Hall will be a perfect venue for this piece. We will have an off-stage choir in one gallery and instruments in another, as well as the chorus and orchestra on stage. It's his way of symbolising completely different spheres of existence, and if you can surrender yourself to the experience, it can be wonderful.\"

In staging this ludicrous match, the Football Association has bleated that it owes a debt of gratitude to England's \"loyal following\", but loyalty is never without limit. Does the FA honestly expect families who have foregone their summer holidays, squeezed by the worst recession in a generation, to welcome a mahogany-toned Frank Lampard back from his beach break in Sardinia? Or does it believe that the average \"loyal\" supporter can muster any generous feeling for a carpet-bagging Joe Cole, fresh from drying the ink on his Pounds 90,000-a-week contract at Liverpool? Despite howls of derision from anyone who watched England's second half against Germany, it appears that it does. As such, the FA has started selling tickets for the humdinger with Hungary at just Pounds 15 each, failing to recognise that this is a bit like putting a price on fruit weeks past its sell-by date. A growing consensus among mutinous fans is that 15 pence would be too great a demand. As for the rotten fruit, this might give the few of them who pay up an idea of what to hurl at Wayne Rooney.

Also present for the full festival is young Finnish violin powerhouse Pekka Kuusisto, who is the very embodiment of joyful music-making. He performed two Humoresques by Sibelius, tossing off the virtuoso solo part as if it were a proverbial walk in the Finnish countryside. One couldn't help but smile at the end.

Even by the US pianist's standards, [Jeremy Denk]'s programme for his UK tour is intricate, beginning in the 14th century with Machaut and ending 600 years later with Stockhausen and Glass. Perth gets a different confection that pits ragtime pieces by Stravinsky, Nancarrow et al against Schubert's sublime B flat Sonata.

[Bent Srensen]'s music - pristine, pregnant with meaning and encapsulating that strange oxymoronic feeling endemic in Danish music of a rough-hewn delicacy - made its point with real assurance, whether marshalling the spatially separated forces (part of the choir and a pair of E flat clarinets performed from within the arena audience) or homing in on some barely audible atmospheric commentary, its wave-like motion a recurring feature.