Missy Mazzoli. Photo: Caroline Tompkins

THE BBC Proms have always been a high-profile way of introducing new music to a wider audience than would normally pick up on such things; and one of the big unveilings of the current season comes this weekend, August 14, when Missy Mazzoli’s new violin concerto gets its European premiere at the Albert Hall.

If her name means nothing to you, look it up. Time Out New York described her, memorably, as “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart”. She has street-cred edge and works beyond the box of conventional concert music but has more than enough technique to fit comfortably inside it if she wants. Hence this concerto, which gets played on Sunday by star soloist Jennifer Koh with the Philharmonia Orchestra, but unfolds on hallucinatory terms that imagine the violinist as a Pied Piper-like sorcerer leading the orchestra through a sequence of healing spells – mostly taken from medieval sources but with acknowledgements to the Brooklyn-based experimental rock-band Black Dice. Get your head around all that and you might enjoy it.

Other Proms highlights this week include the always impressive Benjamin Grosvenor on August 13 playing the most brilliantly engaging of all modern piano concertos, Prokofiev’s 3rd. And August 16 brings a welcome outing for the 1957 Trombone Concerto by George Walker: maybe the most significant black American composer of the 20th century (the newly fashionable scores of Florence Price sound feeble by comparison) though only just beginning to attract the international attention he deserves.

But of special interest for me are connected concerts, on August 17 and 18, in which the BBCSO play the two finest symphonies of Danish composer Carl Nielsen: Nos 3 & 4. Written in the early/mid-20th century, they’re the most exhilarating, uplifting and positive music I know: like sonic caffeine, with a guaranteed high in the 4th when two competing sets of timpani, usually placed either side of the orchestra, do battle for supremacy. If you don’t leave that concert punching the air, you’re a hard case.
Either way, all these things run at the Albert Hall, and in the comfort of your own home courtesy of live broadcasts on Radio 3. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms

• Sometimes radical experiments turn into institutions; and an example is the Tete a Tete Opera Festival which began as a quirky, shoestring effort to bring new chamber-scale opera to the stage, and years later – er – is still a quirky, shoestring effort to do just that, though it’s done now with more impact and expectation than before, as a favourite fixture of the summer season.

This year it runs August 15-September 11 in various venues: mostly King’s Cross or the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone. And the new pieces in the schedule cover subjects ranging from misconduct in an organ loft to the evils of tobacco. Upfront, on August 15, is “We are the Monsters”, a “Celtic fusion project” (sic) that sounds more like a folk concert than opera, but who knows? And on August 18 is “What the dog said to the harvest” which is apparently about climate change and social justice. These may be little operas, but they think big. Details: tete-a-tete.org.uk