If the Berlin Phil has anything as prosaic as a comfort zone, the bulk of this programme wasn't it. Of the five composers in the first of their two Proms, only Wagner was an obvious fit for their trademark sound, as velvety and patrician as ever. Yet all the works gained something from their fastidious attention.
Simon Rattle has been a champion of Sibelius during his time in Berlin, and the players sounded at home in the elusive Fourth Symphony. The music's strange contradictions – the achingly intense strings, the chirpy glockenspiel in the final movement, the restrained, almost deflated ending – fell into place.
The two perfumed tranches of French ballet music in the second half were not quite so idiomatic. It's a cliche to say that this stuff needs to sound impressionistic, but this was a touch too much in focus. The flirty game of tennis portrayed in Debussy's Jeux had more baseline rallies than delicate drop shots. And in the Suite No 2, from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé, we could hear every one of the zillions of notes – every woodwind burble as the rising sun put out its tendrils, every whirl and twirl in the closing dance. That dance set the toes tapping, but it felt more measured than manic. Still, when the orchestra played at full intensity the glow was out of this world.
Boldly, Rattle had begun with Ligeti's brief, masterly Atmospheres, plunging the auditorium into immediate stillness. The music seemed to inhale and exhale, as if the orchestra were a huge human squeezebox. Rattle then "conducted" a silence and carried straight on into Wagner's Lohengrin Prelude – and it turns out that Wagner starts his opera with exactly the same orchestral breathing. Unexpected musical connections are everywhere, but when they are pointed out so skilfully, they feel like little revelations.
• Available on iPlayer until 6 September. If you're at any Prom this summer, tweet your thoughts about it to @guardianmusic using the hashtag #proms and we'll pull what you've got to say into one of our weekly roundups – or leave your comments below.
• This article was amended on 31 August 2012. In the original, the Berliner Philharmoniker performed Sibelius's Third Symphony. This has been corrected.
