After her triumph at last year’s Last Night of the Proms, Marin Alsop returns, joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra for Mahler’s colourful and programmatic First Symphony. The muscular drive of John Adams dominates the first half, featuring the UK premiere his Saxophone Concerto as well as his iconic orchestral miniature Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

Brit Award-nominated Paloma Faith brings her sleek vocals and retro style to a Late Night Prom. The British singer-songwriter is joined by a 42-piece Jazz Orchestra and the Urban Voices Collective. This is cabaret, Royal Albert Hall-style.

The centrepiece of this Prom by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra and Han-Na Chang is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Vivid with textural contrasts and sudden surging climaxes, it is matched for drama by Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto – a Proms favourite, with a slow movement that burns with restrained passion.

After an absence of almost a decade, the Cleveland Orchestra returns to the Proms with music by Brahms and Jörg Widmann. Brahms’s stormy and intricately structured First Symphony contrasts with the levity of his Academic Festival Overture, while Widmann’s concerto – composed for Cleveland’s principal flautist Joshua Smith – is both playful and disorienting.

On Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 80th birthday, the Proms pays tribute in a concert of works selected by the composer himself. The concert overture Ebb of Winter captures the rugged beauty of Davies’s Orkney home. We see a different side of island life in the joyous ebullience of his Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise; the virtuosic fourth Strathclyde Concerto, for clarinet and orchestra, completes the concert.