How much, I wonder, is Verdi's music really open to different approaches? I mean, yes, Toscanini played him fast and intense where Giulini tended towards the slow and spiritual. But both found a quintessentially Italianate line, a songfulness at the heart of the music (as does Pappano, as did Serafin, Gardelli and so many others), suggesting perhaps that the most appropriate title of all of Verdi's works is Il Trovatore – The Troubadour. And that's my sweeping generalisation for the day over with. But there is truth there and it's one that sometimes disturbs me when I listen to Semyon Bychkov conducting the Requiem, as he did at last night's Prom.

Because Bychkov is essentially a revisionist conductor in this music. He would no doubt dispute this, as every conductor always talks about doing what the composers wants. Yet in the hands of a lesser musician, the way Bychkov played with balance to, for instance, uncover the BBC Symphony Orchestra's woodwind time and again even amidst thick orchestration, or some of his more deliberate tempos, would cause the whole structure to fall apart. I know. I've heard it happen many a time.

Yet there's something hypnotic about Bychkov these days and this Prom was very special. It's not just the fact that I was seated in the Grand Tier round to one side, within ear-bursting distance from from the massed forces of three choirs (the BBC Symphony Chorus, the London Philharmonic Choir and the BBC National Chorus of Wales, all on heaven-storming form). It's the way that he retained an iron control over the dynamics while maintaining propulsion. Call it strategy over song, perhaps. Anyway it wasn't especially Verdian, or very Italian actually, and there were moments in the first half where the momentum threatened to sag (not helped by his habit of long pauses between movements). But, by God, the intensity of the thing, by the end, was overwhelming.

Incidentally, the bass Ferruccio Furlanetto seems to have caught what I might call Neil Shicoffitis, defined by doctors as a tendency to put in a little sobbing sound when singing (which the American tenor Shicoff used to do at one point in his career). It's fine when singing a tragic character like Don Carlo's Philip II, but I'm not quite sure why a Requiem soloist would be actually weeping. It's only worth pointing out because Furlanetto has one of the few authentic and authentically impressive Verdi basses around. By his side, Joseph Calleja was the ardent tenor soloist, shaping his lines with warmth and musicality, and Marina Poplavskaya threw herself body and soul into the soprano's utterances. Only the mezzo Mariana Pentcheva was a touch anonymous, if solid.