French Baroque giant Les Arts Florissants launches this season’s Proms Chamber Music concerts at Cadogan Hall with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau, who died 250 years ago. His Pièces de clavecin en concerts sees the composer at his most dramatically vivid and virtuosic, showcasing this ensemble in the first of its two concerts this season.

One of choral music’s greatest works, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass is a passionate, secular oratorio celebrating nationhood and peace. By contrast, conflict is to the fore in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work that distils the drama of the composer’s relationship with Schumann and his wife Clara. Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, with soloist Barry Douglas.

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.

Before her solo appearance at the Last Night of the Proms, Dutch violinist Janine Jansen joins with pianist Itamar Golan and with conductor Sakari Oramo (making his Proms debut as a violinist). Two lyrical works by Prokofiev are paired with Schubert’s sublime Fantasie from almost a century earlier.

In the first of two concerts with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård directs the first of two great Scandinavian symphonies. Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony explores a bleakness that is also at the core of Strauss’s great tone-poem Tod und Verklärung. The ‘complicated nonsense’ of Strauss’s youthful Burleske and Mozart’s sunny Rondo in A major complete the concert, both featuring pianist Franceso Piemontesi.

Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes and Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben were notorious flops at their premieres, yet both are now recognised as peaks of their genre. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra take us from 18th-century France to fin-de-siècle Germany (with a quick stop-off in Chelsea, where the 8-year-old Mozart composed his First Symphony) in a concert that also includes the UK premiere of Bernard Rands’s Piano Concerto.

Pianist Louis Schwizgebel and the dynamic Royal String Quartet are the key players in a concert that culminates in Richard Strauss's richly nostalgic Metamorphosen, heard in an intimate arrangement for string septet. Alongside it are Mahler's contemplative Piano Quartet movement and Mozart's elegantly poised Piano Sonata in D major, K311.

The young British pianist performs a programme with a dance theme pulsing through it. Chopin’s stately Ballade No. 1 gives way to the dizzying virtuosity of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, before the waltz returns, transfigured, in Liszt’s Waltz from ‘Faust’. Mompou’s Paisajes transports us to Barcelona, and Grosvenor also premieres a new work by Judith Weir.

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.