A cultural day in London yesterday, starting with brunch at Cecconi's before taking in the two exhibitions on at the Royal Academy.

Upstairs in the Sackler Galleries they have a wonderful exhibition of Impressionist Sea Paintings. The show focuses on paintings of just one section of the Normandy coast, and kicks off with pre-impressionist work to provide some context for what comes later. They have a number of rather lovely, almost minimalist, Whistlers, together with a few very early Monets - the transition into impressionism seeming far closer to evolution than revolution. The highlights had to be Monets and Renoirs in the final room, the former particularly, but much else to enjoy here too, and interesting to compare the way that a number of artists of the late 19th century dealt with both nascent seaside tourism and coastal landscapes. Well worth a visit.

Then downstairs to the main galleries for this year's Summer Exhibition, which, I think, is one of the better ones. Our favourite rooms were much as always, with some lovely prints in the large Weston Room, including a number of fun pieces such as a hand drawn tourist map of the British Isles and a couple of Baxter cartoons, slightly more substantial works than normal in the Small Weston Room, and a perhaps slightly sparser than normal collection of models and drawings in the architecture room, including Foster's redesign of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin. There were other good rooms too though this year, particularly a new room for photography, including an amazingly detailed photograph of the sculpture gallery at the Louvre, brilliantly hung on the central axis of the galleries, a room of figurative art hung by Ben Levene, a second room of prints, and some fun installation pieces in the last room before the shop. There were also some nice coloured-in Penrose tilings in the Lecture Room, and it was interesting to see that rapid prototypes and inkjet printouts are now firmly established as media.

All this was the prelude though to our first visit to the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall this seasons for the final part of their four year long Ring cycle, each part performed by different cast and orchestra as concert performances. This was a wonderful performance of Götterdämmerung. The BBC SO under up and coming Wagnerian. Donald Runnicles were on top form, and undoubtedly won the battle with the singers for supremacy in the RAH's not unchallenging acoustic, which they actually used quite creatively by positioning horn players up in the top choir balconies. The singers though put up a good fight, improving act by act up to an overwhelmingly moving final solo from Christine Brewer's Brünnhilde. Sir John Tomlinson's Hagen was particularly well sung, with much of Hagen's character conveyed through the singing alone, and Stig Andersen's Siegfried had lots of fun with gestures and expressions. Katherine Broderick, Anna Stephany and Liora Grodnikaite made a stunning set of relatively youthful Rhinemaidens. The fact that it wasn't a staged performance meant that one concentrated far more on the music and the text (we were helpfully provided with full librettos and translations with the excellent Proms progamme), and on balance I think this was a good thing, at least on this occasion. That said without any acting it was, for me, less emotionally involving than the last time I saw the work staged at Covent Garden. The lighting effects they use at the RAH for the proms these days were put to particularly good effect in the final immolation scene, with lots of flickering flames in evidence. Huge admiration for the prommers some of whom managed to stay standing from 4.00 through to 10.00, apart, I assume, from the intervals. The concert's available via the BBC's Listen Again facility for the next week.