Performer: Christine Schäfer

What do you get for the composer who made – and also kind of broke – everything? Arnold Schoenberg’s well-documented phobia of the number 13 aside, he could not have asked for a superior tribute in his 150th anniversary year.

What man wants most is that which he cannot have. With a great deal of humour and attention to detail, Dieter Dorn leads Figaro and the household of his baronial palace through its “day of madness” to give us an evening of wonder.

It often takes time to adjust to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's tempi, but this concert performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro enabled the audience to discover new colours in a well known score. 

A new production of Ariadne auf Naxos is a major draw in itself, but a queue for standing room whose end is on the other side of the opera house is news even in Vienna, especially when the performance is not the première, but the fourth in a run of five and also the one that Franz Welser-Möst left to Jeffrey Tate, who has conducted the piece to positive reviews before.

The seventh of the chamber music Proms this year brought together two of the greatest composers of the early 20th century. Though Debussy was twelve years Schoenberg’s senior, of the two works performed it is Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire which was written first, in 1912, with Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp following three years later in 1915.

At first sight the choice of programme and musicians for this pre-Beethoven Festival concert was a bit odd. Music by Verdi, Richard Strauss and Dvořák played by La Scala's Filarmonica, under the direction of Oxford-born Daniel Harding.The title of the evening – "La Scala on the Rhine" – gave a hint. The Milanese orchestra was on a short tour – to Bonn on Saturday and Dresden on Sunday.