Fifty years after his death, Ralph Vaughan Williams is posthumously breaking out of all the pigeonholes to which he was once assigned. That anyone could ever have listened to his Fourth Symphony and still thought of him as a composer of mild-mannered pastorals is bizarre. It opens with a screaming dissonance, passes through eerie unease and anguish, and ends without any questions resolved or tensions dissipated.

It was very much a piece of the 1930s. If you had to guess its composer, you would be more likely to say Shostakovich than Vaughan Williams. And that, too, is significant. Shostakovich's music is an outburst of coded protest against state terror. But in the Fourth Symphony Vaughan Williams also seems to be uttering a cry of despair on behalf of ordinary people who find themselves victims of forces that they are powerless to resist.

This ordinary person was prepared to cry in anguish at the way Yan Pascal Tortelier conducted the work. I could forgive all his vulgar, grandstanding gestures if they made the orchestra play together and play well. They did neither. The scherzo, which admittedly has tricky metrical changes, was often a splatter of loose ensemble. And Tortelier never lifted the BBC Philharmonic to the level of intensity that the outer movements need. Nor was the orchestral accompaniment any sharper in Rachmaninov's First Piano Concerto, where Yevgeny Sudbin was a neat but underpowered soloist.

At least this disappointing evening had an intriguing opener - Arnold Bax's In Memoriam. Written to commemorate Patrick Pearse, the executed leader of the 1915 Easter Rising in Dublin, it was mysteriously mislaid until 1993. So this was its first public performance, and it revealed a Delius-like tone poem full of Celtic twists, luscious orchestration and one big, hymn-like tune.

Listen to the Proms podcast at timesonline.co.uk/proms

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2009
• The 100 Worst Movies of 2009
• The 100 Best Films of the Decade