Anniversaries are one thing – and they always come readily to the aid of Proms programmers. But 50-year fever is another. This year the Proms seems fixated on the “special significance” of 1958. Well, certain important works were, indeed, performed in certain places that year – so what’s new? On Wednesday, the Proms programme for September 3, 1958, was recreated, and I’m still utterly baffled as to why.

Why, for a start, not celebrate it on September 3? Or, indeed, why not hear the programme for July 23, 1958? And the music itself was hardly revolutionary. Mendelssohn and Brahms were then the choice of the London Philharmonic and Basil Cameron. So what would the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Jirí Belohlávek make of it all? They seemed less than excited about it.

After Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas Overture, the players seemed somewhat recalcitrant in that composer’s Italian Symphony. Belohlávek had clearly decided to build up energy by the individual articulation and precision of each note. So the bright Mediterranean sun that had inspired Mendelsssohn twinkled but didn’t glow. And Belohlávek paced the romantic minuet of the third movement just too slowly for the horns to find their rhythm in the trio.

Then came the first interval: it was deemed that 21st-century concertgoers can’t do such a long haul without two good breaks. When Lars Vogt bounced on stage for Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, he infused an energy into the orchestra. He has been deep into Brahms in his chamber-music festival in Germany, so it was no surprise to find this was a chamber-musical performance. The orchestra strained every responsive nerve, holding back their strength to reveal the self-communing within Vogt’s strong, sensitive and always compelling piano playing.

And then Brahms’s Second Symphony. By now the BBCSO seemed in a better mood. In the long opening movement, one melody followed another with sweet inevitability. Belohlávek refused to luxuriate in any of them, and the lean restraint of his conducting opened airy string textures and some delicious clarinet playing from Richard Hosford.

Editor's choice

• Exclusive: Listen to AC/DC's Black Ice
• Burning Bush with W
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse