This year’s Proms devote an evening on August 20 to jazz legend Miles Davis, pictured here in 1963 [Mallory1180_CC BY-SA 4.0]

CARDS on the table, I’m not Berlioz’s biggest fan: much of his music leaves me cold or strikes me as neurotic, feverish, over-the-top. But I admit to one exception which is all those things to a degree that thrills me. It’s his epic Requiem, described as a Grande Messe des Morts and grand in every sense.

Requiring an enormous orchestra – with four brass bands separated spatially around the auditorium, some 16 timpani and 18 double basses, joined by several hundred voices – its ambition way outsizes all the other celebrated Requiems, even the Britten. And to hear it in an auditorium like the Albert Hall is to feel crushed by an unnerving sense of the implacability of death – as you surely will be if you go to the Prom, Aug 15, where it gets performed by the LSO and massed choruses under Antonio Pappano.

That said, there are moments of uplifting radiance too, when light breaks through the gloom; but they don’t come too often. This is death on cinematic, Cecil B de Mille terms. Not for fragile hearts.

• The other big event in this week’s Proms is the annual visit from Glyndebourne, who, this year, bring their current festival production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Aug 19.

By operatic standards, Ariadne is in fact a relatively intimate piece – and a strange one in that the two halves of the show are almost disconnected. Playing out like an Alan Ayckbourn comedy, the first half glimpses crazy backstage life as singers and dancers prepare for an opera to be performed in the private house of a rich man.

The second half takes you front of house to see the opera itself – although as things unfold, all sense of “performance” vanishes and an extravagantly luscious love story takes over. So what began as a romp ends in dreamlike magnificence.

Glyndebourne’s production will only be semi-staged, but it has fine voices and the LPO in what would ordinarily be the pit. Unmissable.

• Also at the Proms, Aug 17, the stylish clarinettist Anthony McGill comes over from America to give the European premiere of a new concerto by Gabriel Kahane, a composer who crosses sound-worlds, collaborating with the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright. Quoting the writer James Baldwin, it’s called “If love will not swing wide the gates” and explores relationships between apparently conflicting cultures. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays under Ryan Bancroft.

• Elgar’s Cello Concerto is never short of performances: so many you might feel like giving it a rest. But like all great works, it survives over-exposure. And there’s another at the Proms, Aug 16, when the RPO pair it with William Walton’s contrastingly under-exposed 2nd Symphony. Received wisdom has it that the 2nd is a poor relation to the 1st, and I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s still very much worth hearing: seize the opportunity.

• This year marks the centenary of jazz legend Miles Davis, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Proms. On Aug 20, the BBC Concert Orchestra have an evening devoted to Davis and composers like Gershwin from whom he drew inspiration. Also on the bill, Davis’s collaborations with pianist Gil Evans, newly orchestrated.

All Proms takes place at the Royal Albert Hall, and are broadcast live on Radio 3. bbc.co.uk/proms