Music-making beyond compare: what it's like to perform at the Proms The word "festival" is closely related to "feast"" and suggests a time of celebration, of exuberance, of nourishment, of community. A festival is a time of fellowship and good cheer and its distant religious roots in feast-days and holy-days tend to discourage a sense of mere decadence. We can gorge on our CDs at home but in a concert hall we have to share. Nevertheless the banquet tables this year are groaning again with succulent musical delights, stretching out for two months along the green shoulder of Hyde Park and under the watchful, golden eye of Prince Albert. The perennial invention of the BBC Proms is a constant source of wonder. Its British identity is held as firmly as a bulldog's jaw, yet it presents more international artists and works than any other festival anywhere. It keeps alive the old-fashioned notion that "live" music heard on a concert stage might still be an exciting way to spend an evening, yet the central role of the BBC - radio, television and internet - ensures as rich and vital a banquet of broadcasting as it's possible to imagine. The Proms can be sheer good fun, but also surprising, often challenging, never snobbish. The most seasoned concert-goer will always find something that he or she has not heard before (not counting the many world premieres), but there is enough of the great standard repertoire to seduce the most innocent classical music virgin. The Proms has the audacity to programme Frank Zappa's The Adventures of Greggery Peccary in a concert following spiffing selections of Bantock, Elgar and Coates, and the freedom of spirit to be unashamed of having Doctor Who getting into his Tardis a matter of hours before Lully's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme waits in the wings. Although "wings" is not the best way to describe an artist's entrance on to the Albert Hall stage. Those of us who perform there enter from the back of the stage, from the heart perhaps, directly into the jaws of the audience - and a standing audience at that. This is not a crowd of lolling lapdogs, passively waiting to be entertained, but greyhounds: alive and alert, eager to be active participants in the performance ahead. The cheers are loud, the clapping hands are legion (that walk into the mouth of the crowd is daunting) but then... the stillness. The Prommers are among the quietest listeners in the musical world and this concentration is the best token of appreciation a performer can receive. This season in particular has an extra grandeur as it features a good number of operas in concert performance - the entire Wagner Ring cycle plus three of his other operas as well as central 20th-century masterpieces by the English composers Tippett and Britten. Operas in concert usually lack something, they seem somehow reduced in calories, skimmed of their full dramatic impact. But inside the Albert Hall's magnificently rotund bowl nothing is ever slimline. What we miss in physical movement on a stage or in costumes tightly buttoned around a stiffly acting diva, we gain in the sheer sense of occasion and the sharing of an experience with 6,000 others in the same (usually rather warm) space. The Albert Hall is one of the best backdrops one could have, its immense girth a unifying force, a vast skirt under which music lovers can gather. We may regret not seeing Brunhilde literally engulfed in flames at the end of Götterdämmerung, but we will not fail to be singed by the sheer impact of such music in such a setting. Seeing the inner workings of Wagner's vast orchestra contains within it as great a drama as the libretto's gods and monsters. The ancient legends themselves can be retold around a hearth in a small family gathering but the immense musical canvas of the Ring, pushing against the frame of musical history, needs a universe of space. Nowhere in the world is free from talk about justifying the arts, funding the arts, the relevance of the arts. These questions are important because the great cultural treasures we have, both those created in our times and those handed down from the past, are important. That some of the Proms concerts sold out within a few hours after booking opened (thousands of activated credit cards) shows that there is a demand still for live concerts and shows people's willingness to pay for them. Indeed, it's a perfect example of public and private funding working together in full cooperation. The BBC's expertise at curating such an attractive festival attracts the financial support of countless individuals, both Londoners and tourists. And yet, it's a delightful egalitarian irony that at the Proms the best seats in the house are the cheapest seats - and furthermore ones that cannot be booked in advance. You can queue on the day and stand in the arena for just £5 a concert, catching the eye of the performer and catching every sonic nuance to perfection. It is a festival of Hope and Glory; and, through modern technology from radio to wireless internet, its reach is wider still, and wider. Stephen Hough performs Rachmaninov's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" and Lutosawski's 'Variations on a Theme by Paganini" on the Opening night of the Proms at the Albert Hall (bbc.co.uk/proms) tonight. He plays again at the Proms on August 19. His new Touch Press iPad app, The Liszt Sonata, will be available from the iTunes app store from Thursday