The whole of Bristol would have heard the official start of the Bristol Proms at 12.15pm yesterday, as Great George at the top of the Wills Tower rang out for several minutes.

And look who helped it ring:

Yes – it’s the unlikely figure of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, a presenter on Bristol Proms sponsor Classic FM, whose natty floral shirt wasn’t best accentuated by thick red gloves usually only worn when you need to shove your hand down a blocked toilet.

With help from Bristol University’s lead bellringer Matthew Tosh, the noise reverberated around the top of the tower in a deafening A flat peaking at almost 147 decibels, louder than an aircraft carrier deck.

This was sound that you could feel.

When Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti performs at the Bristol Proms on Friday, she will be playing sound that you can see, as her performance will be used to construct real-time visual representations of how energy fields guide atomic motion.

It was the complete opposite at the opening concert last night, which saw the Fitzhardinge Consort sing a cappella choral music in the darkness of the Old Vic studio.

So dark at times you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face, you shut your eyes, open them again and there’s no difference. You could be shutting your eyes in a medieval cathedral, not a concrete basement.

The effect was mesmerising and I found myself on the edge of my seat even though I mostly couldn’t see the performers.

But was it dark enough? And did the acoustics in the studio do the Fitzhardinge Consort justice?

The prodigiously talented Canadian pianist Jan Lisieki played Chopin’s Etudes in the Old Vic theatre, where he was filmed from lots of different angles, the pictures from which were sent down a brand new cable to be viewed live by a second audience in the Watershed.

What the audience at the Watershed couldn’t see was the sheer physicality of Lisieki’s performance, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead as lasers bounced off the walls; one foot occasionally stomping the ground, on the ankle of which was a sock that looked like the inside of a packet of Skittles.

And what the audience at the Old Vic couldn’t see, those in the upper echelons anyway, were the 18-year-old’s Lisieki’s lightning fast fingers in crystal clarity on a cinema screen, certainly more engaging than what could have been deemed as the dual distractions for the live audience of lasers and triangles mapping the contours of the young pianist’s body.

The evening ended with a Heath Robinson-style makeover of the same piano, now complete with everything from bottle tops to bubble wrap as German pianist and composer Hauschka debuted a new collaboration with Bristol-based artist Rod Maclachlan, who used a robot camera to give us a glimpse of the prepared piano’s new innards.

Classical music but not as we know it. There are five days left of the Bristol Proms and it’s got off to a flyer.

Visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/bristolproms.html for more information.