Tuesday evening, written up belatedly. To the Royal Albert Hall for one of the Proms concerts. I have a ticket in the stalls, courtesy of Rob Cowan, for which I’m truly grateful. The seat commands a decent view from the stage left side, is comfortable, and even swivels to provide extra leg room for those of us with long, unsupple legs.

The main arena is standing room only, for the ‘Prommers’ which give the concerts their name and defining feature. Inexpensive tickets, cheap access to top-rate classical performances, as long as you don’t mind queuing and standing. Some of the Prommers take it very seriously indeed, attending every single one of the 70-odd summer dates and forming little intense societies of their own. Some of them organise collections for charity, and in the interval there’s a group announcement from the arena, saying how much they’ve raised so far. They don’t have a microphone, so they make the announcement together like a chant.

I’ve been a Prommer myself once, as a teenager for Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition. I remember chatting with – and being looked after by – a thin, bespectacled Prommer who was famous among the regulars. He was first in the queue, and I was told he always had his own place down the front, dead centre. I remember tuning in for the televised Last Night At The Proms that year, and easily spotting him down the front, singing along with all the flag wavers. I can’t quite tell from the stalls if he’s still there these days, though.

I’ve come to hear Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Ligeti’s Atmospheres (1961). The Bartok is moody and strange and folk-influenced, while the Ligeti is downright avant-garde. Soundscapes of colour, the tuning of braking trains from distant dreams. Atmospheres features in the dark screen ‘overture’ to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick also uses Ligeti for the bits with the monolith, and the long bit at the end where the astronaut’s pod whizzes through endless landscapes of oddness. If it’s in 2001 and sounds scary, abstract and otherworldly, it’s Ligeti.

Note to self: stop pronouncing him ‘Li-GET-tee’ It’s ‘LIG-erty’. Hungarian, not Italian.

What makes tonight’s concert attractive enough to fill about 80% of the Hall, even in the midst of a Tube strike, is not just the inclusion of this challenging fare (the Ligeti’s never been played at the Proms before), but that the orchestra playing it is more suited to traditional Strauss waltzes and polkas. It’s the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

The Telegraph gives this concert a critical pasting the next day, saying the VPO are too polished, corporate and old-fashioned to handle the modern stuff. Well, the Bartok is 70 years old and the Ligeti is 40, but it’s modern enough for the VPO, established in 1842.

It’s true they’re hardly innovative in the gender equality stakes: I read that their first female member was only admitted in 2003, making front page news in Austria at the time. It does seem an anachronistic, golf-club-like imbalance these days, particularly when the audience tonight (like classical fans in general) is about fifty-fifty male and female. In fact, two women behind me comment loudly on how few ladies are on stage. ‘There’s one – on harp!’. ‘I think I see another one in the woodwinds…’

2001 – Humanity discovers an alien monolith.

2003 – the VPO discovers women.

But old-fashioned or no, they do the difficult stuff perfectly well as far as my ears are concerned. The slow, sparse first movement of the Bartok piece has the audience gripped from the off. It’s almost as if the entire Albert Hall is holding its breath. Barenboim jumps in the air for the faster passages.

And the Ligeti is astonishing; suitable otherworldly and dreamy. At one point, two men open up a grand piano and stroke the strings inside with what I imagine are special Ethereal Soundscape brushes.

Also in the programme are more melodic, traditional pieces: Kodaly’s Dances Of Galanta and Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No 1. There’s also two encores of Strauss: the catchy Annen-Polka and a fitting Hail To Hungary (given the Eastern European theme), complete with shouted ‘hoy!’ at the end. All of which pleases both audience and performers (there’s even some dancing in the Prommers’ arena), but it’s the experimental stuff that really delights my heart.

I really should go to more classical gigs. Apart from anything else, they smell nice. People are generally better deodorised.

The new school and college year is about to begin, because I overhear this from the crowds spilling out of the Albert Hall:

Girl: Oh I really love my year, daddy!

Dad: Are you with all your buddies?

The tube strike isn’t a pain at all. For many, it’s an excuse for to get some exercise from walking, particularly as the weather’s warm and dry. I happily march all the way across Hyde Park at night, along the main road that runs down the middle, and along Oxford Street to Tottenham Court Road. Then I catch a tube home. The Northern Line is unaffected, so my journey isn’t as awkward as it could be. It’s been a perfectly lovely evening, in fact.