Anniversaries of one kind or another dominate our cultural life. The lapse of 50, 100, 200 years since a famous artist was born or died is irresistible magic to concert programmers, but true cultural vitality does not depend on such randomness. Significant musical developments of the past 50 years, be they post-war serialism, the early-music and period-performance movement or minimalism, did not happen because of anniversary celebrations. One wonders if recent year-long ones for Mozart and Shostakovich have had any real creative consequences, or whether the Messiaen centenary — copiously celebrated at the Proms — will sow any seeds and prove more than an administrative convenience.

Not that it does great harm to be presented with huge quantities of the music of distinguished composers, and in some cases the serendipitous revaluation may be telling.

I have a suspicion that this year’s plethora of performances — not least at the Proms — to mark 50 years since Vaughan Williams’s death may coincide with a new and unabashed acceptance of his music, a willingness to see him in a broad historical context, not just as an English nationalist.

The Proms have been taking the celebration of this date further. In the excellent Prom Plus series at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre, there was an interesting discussion, chaired by Matthew Sweet, of the state of culture in 1958. On the panel were the novelist Alan Sillitoe, whose novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a zeitgeist indicator of that year, and Anthony Thwaite, who published his first book of poetry then, and told us about his friend Philip Larkin. Perhaps the most famous post-war English poem, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, is a residue of the year, as are Carry On Sergeant, the first in the series of films, and Cliff Richard’s Move It, the country’s first rock’n’roll single. The 1950s that emerged from the talk were not at all the grey, spartan decade they are generally taken for, but a sunny, opportunity-laden upbeat to the 1960s. Indeed, the panellists spoke of a “long” 1960s, beginning at least halfway through the 1950s.

A concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek enshrined 1958 by the simple device of replicating a programme from that year’s Proms. This was one given at the Albert Hall by the London Philharmonic, under Basil Cameron, and included two symphonies and a long concerto, Brahms’s second for piano. Back then, the audience had to wait more than 80 minutes for an interval, before returning to hear Brahms’s Second Symphony. In these pampered latter-days, we had two intervals, and the programme did not feel overlong. The other works were Mendelssohn’s captivating Ruy Blas overture and his Symphony No 4. Lars Vogt was the powerful, poetic soloist in the concerto, and Belohlavek’s reading of the Brahms symphony was an outstanding display of musicianship, though “display” isn’t really the word for this unflashiest of maestros.

When Vaughan Williams died in 1958, aged 86, he had completed nine symphonies, but the canonical achievement must have come as a surprise to many, for he did not start the Eighth until 1953. Even an “early” symphony such as the Fourth was not begun until he was nearly 60, but if ever there were a musical candidate for being an “angry young man” — the label stuck on Sillitoe, among others — it was the VW of this remorselessly dissonant work. It received a tremendous performance from the BBC Philharmonic at a Prom conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier, who ensured the obsessive play with motifs never seemed angrily overinsistent, but served the development of a thrillingly cogent structure.

Formal brilliance, combined with directness of manner and richness of material, typifies VW’s symphonies at least from the Third, and the Eighth adds to these qualities a scintillating compactness. It was played at a Prom by the orchestra for which it was written, the Hallé, under its music director, Mark Elder, who was new to the score. This was a subtle, stylish reading that left me wanting to compare the work with the strange, playful, delectably coloured final symphonies of Nielsen, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. So much for the English “cowpat” image of Vaughan Williams.

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