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Mischievous tricksters and magical fairy tales meet in a fantastical programme from Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Incorrigible troublemaker Till Eulenspiegel is up to no good in the witty, light-footed antics of Strauss’s tone-poem. A clever monkey faces off against a lion in the UK premiere of American composer Anthony Davis’s Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey and a nightingale must charm Death to spare the Emperor of China in Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale. At the heart of the programme is one of the great Romantic violin concertos: Augustin Hadelich is the soloist in Mendelssohn’s vivacious, melody-filled masterpiece.

Grammy-winning artist Arooj Aftab is breaking new ground with her captivating, eclectic melting-pot of influences from jazz, folk, pop, blues and South Asian classical. For her Proms debut tonight, Aftab collaborates with Jules Buckley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to explore her distinctive sound on a symphonic scale.

Das klagende Lied, Mahler’s musical coming-of- age, is a chilling fable of jealousy, murder and magic. An eerie woodland and a lively wedding ceremony are the centrepieces of a cantata of vast sonic imagination – a foretaste of the symphonies to come, heard here in its original three-part version. Mahler’s sonic scope meets its match in the musical spectacle of Pierre Boulez’s ‘majestic processional’ Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. Dedicated to the composer’s long-time colleague and friend, the work transforms the concert hall into a temple, in which the audience is immersed in the sounds created by eight groups of musicians.

Desire, brutality and the supernatural are shaken together in the orchestral kaleidoscope of Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. Josep Pons conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the last of Bartók’s three great music-theatre scores, an electrifying fusion of folk music and modernism. Angular brilliance gives way to exotic, Impressionistic colours in Dukas’s exotic ‘danced poem’ La Péri. ‘Remarkable’ Italian pianist Beatrice Rana is the soloist in Rachmaninov’s thrilling Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Feel the beat. From the primal, hypnotic dances of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to the sensual throb of Ravel’s Boléro and the edgy thrum and twitch of Varèse’s Intégrales, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Eva Ollikainen get the musical pulse racing. They’re joined by ‘stupendous’ German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser for the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Before we fall – a work that teeters on the edge of ‘a multitude of opposites’, torn between lyricism and distorted energy.

‘No other English composer offers more beauty in sound,’ Thomas Beecham said of Delius. There’s no more extravagant, impassioned or overwhelming a canvas for that beauty than A Mass of Life. Taking Nietzsche’s rapturous prose-poem Also sprach Zarathustra as a starting point, Delius imagined a secular Mass – a cantata for orchestra, chorus and soloists celebrating the transcendent power and triumph of the human spirit in the face of death. Sir Mark Elder conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with soloists including baritone Roderick Williams and tenor David Butt Philip.

‘Perhaps people find something they need in this piece ... something they were missing.’ Henryk Górecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ translates a century’s loss and pain into sound, gathering up the broken pieces – of history, prayer and poetry – and giving them a home in music that’s as much requiem as a symphony. Joshua Bell is the soloist in Ukraine-born composer Thomas de Hartmann’s emotive, cinematic Violin Concerto, a lament for the Nazi destruction of his homeland. The concert opens with Respighi’s warmly expansive reworking of an organ chorale prelude by J. S. Bach.

An all-French programme whose first half – 150 years after the composer’s death – celebrates the bright, exotic colours conjured by Bizet. As well as a suite from his incidental music for ‘The Girl from Arles’, we hear the fantasy for violin and orchestra featuring music – including the famous ‘Habanera’ – from his best-loved opera, reimagined with explosive virtuosity by Sarasate. South Korean violinist Inmo Yang makes his Proms debut in the seductive, mercurial mantle of Bizet’s Gypsy-heroine. Saint-Saëns’s spectacular Symphony No. 3 puts the 9,999 pipes of the Royal Albert Hall organ (nicknamed the ‘Voice of Jupiter’) in the spotlight at the climax of this monumental work, and there’s more musical drama from gods and sea monsters in Augusta Holmès’s tone-poem Andromède.

Composer and conductor Thomas Adès has long been a fan of Sibelius: ‘He’s obsessed with nature – you’ve always got this sense that he is on the edge of some vast wilderness.’ Adès drew inspiration from the Finnish composer’s incidental music for The Tempest when writing his own opera on the Shakespeare play. He conducts suites from both these storm-laden, supernatural works, along with The Swan of Tuonela, in which Sibelius summoned up his skill as a bard of Swedish folk tales. James McVinnie is the soloist in Gabriella Smith’s organ concerto Breathing Forests, a cavernous ‘sonic forest’ and howl of protest against natural destruction.

Prize-winning young Viennese pianist Lukas Sternath makes his Proms debut in Grieg’s beloved Piano Concerto, with its heart-on-sleeve melodies and intimate lyricism. The piece is framed by two musical products of war: a haunting elegy by Vaughan Williams’s pupil Ruth Gipps, inspired by a William Blake illustration of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and anniversary-composer Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes, a cantata composed for the reopening in 1962 of Coventry Cathedral – part Passion, part howl of human loss, part musical prayer for a ‘troubled world’.