Ben Nobuto at the Proms is a name to watch [Manchester Collective/Phil Sharp]

IF the weather doesn’t tell you it’s mid-July, there’s another (more reliable) source of information that arrives July 19 in the Proms – which, as Radio 3 has been plugging to the point of self-congratulatory exhaustion, are the biggest classical music festival on the planet, defining summertime London for the vast numbers who either pour into the Albert Hall or listen at home.

Every one of this year’s 89 concerts is broadcast live on radio, 24 of them also on TV. It’s a marathon of pleasure. And among the TV showings is the First Night, which features the BBC Symphony Orchestra – plus Chorus and Singers – in music by Bruckner, Beethoven and Clara Schumann. Also on the programme is a new work by Ben Nobuto, a young Anglo-Japanese composer who sprang seemingly from nowhere last year with a strikingly imagined choral piece that won awards. He’s somebody I’d tip for a significant career. Worth catching on the way.

As for the rest of the Proms week, July 21 has a morning event that pulls together two of the outstanding UK vocal ensembles of modern times, the King’s Singers and Voces8. Then, in the evening, Highgate-based conductor Sir Mark Elder says goodbye to the orchestra he’s run for the past quarter-century, the Halle, with what can only be a charged account of Mahler’s 5th Symphony.

July 23 brings another choral supermatch when Crouch End Festival Chorus join the BBC National Chorus of Wales for a predictably seismic performance of Verdi’s Requiem. And later that night there’s a recital by countertenor-of-the-moment Jakub Josef Orlinski, singing Monteverdi with baroque band Il Pomo d’Oro.

July 24 departs from the classical canon for an orchestral tribute to the songs of Nick Drake, 50 years on from his death at only 26. And if that doesn’t wallow deep enough in tragedy, July 25 has mezzo Alice Coote singing Mahler’s beyond-bleak Kindertotenlieder: Songs on the Deaths of Children. Rumour has it that the BBC will issue Kleenex.

Details of everything at bbc.co.uk/proms. And remember, even if all seats are sold, there will still be standing places available at the door for £8. The price of a couple of coffees. Cheaper than Taylor Swift.

• Proms aside, Opera Holland Park have a new production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea running July 19-August 2 under young conductor Michael Papadopoulos, who happens to be the son of the Oxford Philharmonic’s founding conductor Marios Papadopoulos. Another music dynasty in the making. operahollandpark.com

• And for an uncommon way to spend a Sunday lunchtime, Burgh House in Hampstead offers, on July 21, a young Australian doing things with a cello you might not have thought possible. William Jack studied conventionally enough in Vienna but repurposed his strictly classical training into directions that embrace jazz, folk, and genres so off the map they don’t have names.

He sometimes plays his cello sideways, like an oversized guitar, using a plectrum. Then he’ll shift the mood into a suite by Bach. You never know what happens next – except that he’s about to take this ride through musically uncharted territories to Edinburgh, playing the Fringe. Experience it here first. burghhouse.org.uk