The Proms have reached a festival within a festival, with three concerts marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sibelius. This second concert, like the first, was in the hands of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this time under the direction of Ilan Volkov.

It was also the only one to feature a piece not by the mighty Finn himself, though there was a strong Sibelius connection in the world premiere of Michael Finnissy’s Janne. This alert and tricksy tribute to Sibelius’s distinctive sound world – the title is the diminutive of the composer’s given name – was suitably enigmatic. It teasingly managed to keep a nano-step ahead of any actual quotations but towards the end, the piece seemed to lose its way.

Volkov started with a fluent if unremarkable account of the Third Symphony. The confident opening movement was well paced, with its dynamic changes idiomatically handled. The middle movement’s mysterious transition from inner warmth to something more forbidding was deftly achieved, too, and the gathering energies of the finale were skilfully managed.

Yet these middle symphonies of Sibelius require more interpretative ambition and tension than Volkov offered, an absence that was more remiss in the Fourth Symphony, which closed the concert. The music was mostly well played, and the dark Sibelius sound with which the symphony begins and ends is so assured that it will always have a striking effect; but this performance never quite shook the soul as it should.

There was also a tendency to play safe in Volkov’s accompaniment of Julian Rachlin’s reading of the Violin Concerto. Rachlin’s challengingly introspective account, with the violin sometimes a still, small voice amid the swelling orchestral cosmos, came across as rather too calculated to be entirely persuasive. Again, this was a performance that didn’t reach out to the listener in the way the Albert Hall space demands.

• Available on iPlayer. The Proms continue until 12 September.