The festival opens with Elgar’s biblical oratorio The Kingdom – the beautiful ‘slow movement’ of a planned musical triptych. Celebrated Elgarian Sir Andrew Davis conducts the massed forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the BBC National Chorus of Wales. They are joined by a distinguished cast of soloists including Proms regulars Christopher Purves and Catherine Wyn-Rogers.

In its only UK concert this year, classical supergroup the World Orchestra for Peace returns to the Proms with its conductor Valery Gergiev. Fantasy confronts reality in a programme that moves from the fairy-tale magic evoked in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten to the human tragedy of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Roxanna Panufnik’s Three Paths to Peace celebrates the common ground shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Turbulent mythical love meets poised Classical elegance in a concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra that sets Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 alongside Ravel’s sensuous ballet score Daphnis and Chloe. Launching us far beyond either Mozart’s Vienna or Ravel’s Paris, Jonathan Dove’s new orchestral work Gaia Theory explores the idea of life on our planet evolving alongside the environment.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 – an orchestral showpiece of shifting moods and intense emotions – is the culmination to this concert by the BBC Philharmonic. The orchestra is joined by Pianist Alexandre Tharaud for Ravel’s virtuosic Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and the programme opens with Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s atmospheric Night’s Black Bird.

Two rarely heard masterpieces continue our 150th-anniversary celebrations of Richard Strauss: the mighty Festival Prelude and the Deutsche Motette (practically a concerto for choir). We move to more familiar musical territory with Strauss’s Four Last Songs, whose late-Romantic nostalgia is shared by Elgar’s Second Symphony.