Great humanitarian and decidedly so-so conductor Daniel Barenboim. Photograph: Andrea Tamoni/AP
Can it be the last week of the Proms already? Are we really in our eighth week of withstanding intolerable personal hygiene issues and torturous upright stress positions? Is it officially the end of the Great British Summer - which everyone knows begins with the start of the Proms season and comes to a close with the last cacophonous verse of God Save the Queen on Saturday night?
Judging by the mild arthritic feeling in my left knee and the crisply copper-coloured leaves I had to trudge through on the way to work this morning, the answer is yes on all counts. But there's still a lot left to enjoy this week, not least the chance to get yourself motherlessly drunk on Saturday in time for the final populist push we call the Last Night.
Until then, we have the Vienna Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra to look forward to. This triumvirate of top orchestras are for the most part bringing with them the least interesting programmes of the season - the common or garden variety Bartók pieces, the usual symphonies by Brahms and Bruckner, Beethoven's very frequently heard violin concerto - but it's always worth going along just to hear these great old masters perform in their variously inimitable ways.
The top pick of the week is probably Tuesday night's Vienna Philharmonic concert. Great humanitarian and decidedly so-so conductor Daniel Barenboim is on the podium, but we can forgive that - especially when the programme includes Ligeti's extraordinary Atmosphères, the piece that introduced avant-garde classical music to cinemagoers worldwide when Stanley Kubrick used it as the so-called Overture to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To hear Ligeti played by an orchestra as steeped in tradition as the Vienna Philharmonic should make for an unusual concert to say the least - this is, after all, the orchestra who only admitted their first female member in 2003. Ligeti shares the programme with fellow Hungarian-Romanians Bartók, Enescu and Kodály: it will either make for a genuinely fascinating experience, or an ill-advised disaster.
Either way, do your best to turn up or tune in - it's risk-taking like this that makes the Proms worthwhile.
