Simon Rattle and Schumann come to the Proms [Oliver Helbig]

WHEN Richard Strauss was a young man he wrote an orchestral tone-poem, Death and Transfiguration, that depicts an artist on his death-bed thinking of the past.

When Strauss was old and in a similar position, he apparently told his daughter: “Death is just as I composed it.”

And for those who want to share his insights, the piece gets played at what should be one of this year’s Proms highlights – when the Boston Symphony Orchestra roll into London under their star conductor, Andris Nelsons.

The date is August 25. The programme includes Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony. And as we don’t get too many major orchestras flying into the Albert Hall from overseas any more, thanks to Brexit and budgets, this is a visit to take note of.

Also at the Proms this week is a big Mahler symphony – his mighty monstrous Third, filling the entire concert on August 19. And on the subject of might, August 23 brings Handel’s Samson: written as an oratorio not opera, but a powerfully dramatic one in which the blinded biblical hero brings the house down. Literally. Sung here by British tenor Allan Clayton, with a fine cast backed by the Academy of Ancient Music, expect the earth to shake.

Somebody else who shakes things up (the clue is in the name) is Simon Rattle, who comes to the Proms this week with Schumann’s operatic oratorio Paradise and the Peri: a piece about the offspring of a fallen angel (which is what Peris are) trying to access heaven. Popular in the composer’s lifetime but not often done today, this is a rare chance to hear it.

And Schumann-lovers should know that they can also catch his 1st Symphony on August 24 – in a concert that starts with a world premiere from Master of the King’s Music, Judith Weir.

Details of all Proms at bbc.co.uk/proms. Standing places at just £8 (it’s a snatch).

And everything goes out live on Radio 3.

• Opera is weighed down today with issues about race and gender, and they get particularly problematic in works like Madam Butterfly and Turandot that take place in what it was once acceptable to call the “exotic” East. So it’s interesting to see that there’s a small-scale production of Turandot running August 23-26 in the Grimeborn Opera Festival at the Arcola, Dalston, with an all-Asian cast and general rethink of the way Puccini’s fantasy plot handles Chinese stereotypes.

Much is being made of this; and if successful, it will testify to the impressive number of good opera-singers who emerge these days from Asian backgrounds.

But of equal interest will be how they manage to reduce the pageant-like grandeur of Turandot down to pint-size. That will take invention.

Also playing the Arcola is a double-bill of Ravel’s all-nudging/winking erotic comedy L’Heure Espagnol with Massenet’s Portrait of Manon – a coda to the story of Manon Lescaut that imagines what might happen after the eponymous heroine dies horribly in the desert.

Such are the more usual concerns of opera. August 22-26. arcolatheatre.com