Standing in a car park in south London on a tropical summer's night, you might not expect to have lines from Plato's Republic pounding in your head – unless you happen to be a classically trained retreating mayor. Boris will surely know Plato's views on the dangerous powers of music and its potential to influence character and alter the laws of state. The Republic contains a long section on the topic, as well as pointing out the usefulness of carrying a zither or lyre in town, and a herdsman's pipe in the country.
Plato's text is the starting point for Louis Andriessen's large-scale work De Staat (1972-6), which he calls "a contribution to the debate about the relationship of music to politics". Now 75 and ever a radical, the pioneering Dutch composer has inspired a generation of younger composers. A comparison might be the impact Michael Craig Martin, 72, has made on the Young British Artists. Andriessen should be better known outside contemporary music circles than he is.
The Multi-Story Orchestra, named after the now well established Peckham venue, played De Staat on two nights this week, heroically conducted by Christopher Stark, who despite the melting heat kept the motoric rhythms precise and urgent. Lasting around 40 minutes, De Staat is written for trumpets, oboes, horns, trombones and violas, with pairs of guitars, harps and pianos but no other strings, woodwind or percussion. Noisy, pulsating rhythms and hockets, interspersed with four women's voices singing quotes from Plato, communicate powerfully, ending with a repeated pattern which comes to an abrupt halt. Andriessen's highly personal, minimalist dissonance left ears ringing and spirits leaping.
In the marginally more restrained forum of the Albert Hall, the Proms played to home strengths in the season's third week, with all the corporation's orchestras – BBC Symphony, BBC Concert, BBC Scottish, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Philharmonic – in residence and achieving high standards. The survival of these ensembles is always under debate. It will be one of the first headaches to confront whoever replaces Roger Wright as new controller of Radio 3. Yet how cheering, after doldrum years in some cases, to report that each orchestra is now sounding better than ever, with outstanding conductors – this week Donald Runnicles, Mark Wigglesworth, Sakari Oramo, John Wilson, Gianandrea Noseda – making them play for their lives.
Between them they catered for all tastes, from Kiss Me, Kate and War Horse to Mahler, Stravinsky, Casella and various premieres. Matthew Trusler, making his Proms debut with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (Prom 27), was soloist in William Mathias's neglected Violin Concerto (1992), written near the end of his life. This prolific Welsh composer, liked by all who knew him, stuck to lyrical, tonal conventions. This concerto, receiving its London premiere, followed suit. Trusler brought out the elegiac quality, and played with a rich, glowing tone, but the four movements seemed hemmed in by an inescapable sameness and slim orchestration, which even this engaging and assured soloist could not disguise.
Conductor Mark Wigglesworth, music director of the BBC NOW until 2000, marked his return with early Wagner, the breezy overture to his Das Liebesverbot, in which it all sounded cheerfully Italianate, a reminder of Wagner's early enthusiasms. Musicians and conductor then brought clarity and rigour to Elgar's First Symphony. While Mathias's concerto has been compared to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, it was Elgar's music that seemed to take on their febrile colours, whether in the tough argument of the first movement, the prickly debate of the scherzo or the frenzied, nervous finale.
Last week the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Vasily Petrenko (Prom 19) played Elgar's Second Symphony (1909-11). A private, neurotic man, Elgar admitted he had "shewn" his soul in this and other works written at the time, including the Violin Concerto. Unlike the First, an instant success, this second symphony was a failure. The appalled composer described the audience as having "sat there like a lot of stuffed pigs". We've all met them. In their Strauss/Elgar programme, the RLPO triumphed. Unstuffed and not remotely porcine, the enthusiastic audience would have warmed Elgar's heart.
The Proms' contribution to Lights Out on Monday, marking Britain's entry into the first world war, was a late-night programme of music by John Tavener performed by the Tallis Scholars and director Peter Phillips (Prom 25). First came Ikon of Light, written for the Tallis forces who premiered it in 1984. Luminous and intense, using drones and canons and three strings (members of the Heath Quartet), it starts and ends with choral outbursts on the Greek word "fos" ("light"). The basso profondo voice, typical of Russian Orthodox music and favoured by Tavener, is rumblingly prominent. A singer once told me that beer and curry helped him deal with these subterranean vocal challenges, whether before or after the event I cannot remember.
Tavener, who died last year aged 69, was prolific until the end. The posthumous world premiere of his Requiem Fragments (2013) had not seemed likely to yield anything new. Instead it could hardly have been more striking or original. Taking words from the Requiem mass and Hindu sources, it is scored for string quartet and two trombones as well as voices. The music works quietly through "flat" keys except at moments of radiance, as in the Sanctus (marked "An explosion of joy and bliss"), when sharps and double sharps take over and the harmony expands as if pushing ever outward towards light.
A soprano line, serenely sung by Carolyn Sampson, floats ethereally over the choir, who at times sing in gently ricocheting 12 parts, creating a buoyant continuum of sound. If this was Tavener's vision of eternity, we should envy him. Before the concert ended, the choir sang his The Lamb and Samuel West read Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth. Prommers in the arena held tea lights, extinguishing them one by one. If camera lights and electronic widgets and health and safety didn't allow total darkness, the stillness was absolute.
