Prepare to have your socks blown off: Isabelle Demers

I HAVEN’T counted them personally but am told that the Royal Albert Hall’s organ has 9,999 pipes (you’d have thought they’d find room for the extra one); and most if not all of them will be put to use on August 26 when one of the world’s leading players, Isabelle Demers, flies in from Canada for what should be an organ recital like no other. She’s a serious virtuoso.

She transcribes orchestral music for the organ as you’ve never heard it. And her afternoon appearance at the Proms will blow your socks off. Possibly with other items of apparel.

There’s a lot of traffic to the Proms from North America this week, and it includes the Boston Symphony Orchestra with an evening concert on August 26 that offers the UK premiere of Four Black American Dances by Carlos Simon: a composer whose music reflects on black cultural experiences from slavery through to the present day.

With not so many foreign orchestras of note flying in for the Proms this year, there’s nonetheless a mini-glut during the next few days – notably the Berlin Radio Symphony on August 31 bringing Thomas Ades’s fearsomely difficult Piano Concerto, and the venerable Zurich Tonhalle on August 30 bringing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto: one of the (many) great works of music with a gay sub-story that’s laid buried over the years.

Written in the anguished aftermath of an ill-fated try at heterosexual marriage, it was effectively a love-gift for the real object of the composer’s affections at the time, a young violinist called Josif Kotek; and Tchaikovsky planned to dedicate the score to Kotek, though he changed his mind out of fear that it would generate gossip about their relationship.

All this you might ponder when the latterday virtuoso Augustin Hadelich plays it at the Albert Hall.
Another Prom of note this week comes August 27 when Simon Rattle gives his last UK concert as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra. Fittingly, it features Mahler’s Symphony No.9 which the composer understood in valedictory terms (he started on a 10th but didn’t live to finish it), marking onto the score the word “Farewell.” Details of this and every Prom at bbc.co.uk/proms

• If you ever wonder about the future of opera – and many of us do – there are periodic glimpses of what it might be at the annual Tête à Tête festival which runs August 29-September 12 and stages short, experimental works, usually no more than 40 minutes long, that tackle subjects outside the usual remit of opera.

On the schedules this year are pieces about the life of a hedge in Cornwall; Woolwich Arsenal football club; the 1980s by-election when Peter Tatchell’s attempt to stand was undermined by a smear campaign; and the time when matinee idol Ivor Novello found himself sharing a cell in Wormwood Scrubs with a south London gangster. Intriguing or what?

Most events take place at the Cockpit Theatre, Gatehouse Street, NW8 and run back to back with several shows in a single evening. So dive in (tickets are inexpensive). Details: tete-a-tete.org.uk