Friday night’s Prom brought the most lavish centenary tribute to John Cage I’ve yet seen. It began with a number of ‘music walks’ around Kensington. Armed with maps, we set off with our MP3 players, listening to newly composed hommages to the great prophet of chance and nonsense. Some of us got a bit lost, but somehow we made it to the Serpentine to see a model of the Albert Hall float across the lake in the evening sun. One felt no need to ask why.

Nor did we during the main event in the hall itself. Taking part was a host of legendary avant-garde figures, many of whom knew Cage, like composer Christian Wolff and singer Joan La Barbara.

With them was the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, along with the conductor who’d curated the whole event, Ilan Volkov. There were four grand pianos in the arena, and batteries of percussion placed in boxes around the hall. And there were cactuses - whole flotillas of them, along with seed pods, leaves, pine cones, strips of bark...

A piece made by plucking cactus spines and rustling seed-pods is just the kind of prank one would expect from the composer of the famous silent piece 4.33”. The danger with Cage is that people conclude he’s ‘just a joke’ (as some of my colleagues do, and they showed it by staying away). But the humour of Cage is a delicate thing, and only emerges when the performers take the music completely seriously. Which these 20 cactus-players did, with the result that the beauty of the hugely magnified sounds - like giant water droplets – magically emerged.

It was the same story with two pieces played by the orchestra.

They played Cage’s 101 from 1988 with reverent care, listening to each other with the same intensity one expects from a string quartet. Pianist John Tilbury brought just the exquisite touch to Cage’s Concerto for prepared piano that one expected from him, and the orchestra responded in kind.

Best of all was the combined performance of Cartridge Music, Winter Music and Atlas Eclipticalis. Mingled together were hugely magnified sounds of tiny scratched objects, delicately placed chords from the four pianists, and enigmatic orchestral interjections. It was all co-ordinated by the slowly moving arms of Ilan Volkov, who seemed to quite enjoy playing the role of a human clock. How many maestri would submit to that indignity?

Reflecting every aspect of John Cage's hugely diverse output in a single centenary concert may be impossible, but the evening that Ilan Volkov had devised for the Proms celebration came pretty close. Lasting over three and a half hours, and involving the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the choral group Exaudi and 27 solo performers, many with impeccable Cageian credentials, it included 10 of Cage's works, drawn from all but the very earliest phase of his creative life.

There was a handful of classics from the 1950s and 60s. The delicate, elusive Concerto for Prepared Piano, had John Tilbury as the perfectly restrained soloist, while the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis was played by Volkov and the BBCSSO together with Winter Music, realised by four pianists arrayed around the RAH arena. It was preceded by Cartridge Music, created by amplifying the sounds of objects inserted into record-player cartridges. But if it has been the ideas in Cage's music that have had the most profound influence on subsequent composers, then many of the pieces that Volkov programmed showed their intrinsic beauty, too – whether in the 1988 101 for unconducted large orchestra, a glacially slow procession of massive chords, or the tiny modal EE Cummings setting Experiences II from 1948, which was sung with cool poise by Joan La Barbara.

Perhaps it was all a bit po-faced – Cage's sense of humour and playfulness never came through – and perhaps it was too long. Omitting the two works not by Cage, especially the Improvisation by four old Cage hands, which seemed incongruous in a concert celebrating a composer who profoundly mistrusted improvisation, would have made a difference. And the amplified rustles and rattles of But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper? seemed just a bit too similar to those of Branches, in which all the sounds come from plant materials, such as cactuses, seed pods and dried grass. Altogether, though, it was a very worthy tribute.

Now they know how many cacti it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Last night’s marathon John Cage Prom finished up, over three hours after it had started, with a wonderfully cactus-heavy performance of Branches (1976). Played by Robyn Schulkowsky and 20 more musicians scattered broadly around the hall, Branches involved copious amplified cactus-plucking as well as plenty more soft sounds thoughtfully extracted from a range of natural, foresty items such as sticks and twigs. Cage, who only asked for a “pod rattle” and “at least one (preferably several)” cacti, would surely have smiled even more broadly than usual.

The lavishness of this realisation typified the sincere and smiling attitude of the evening as a whole. It isn’t possible within a coherent review of this length to account for it all, as the performances and performers were far too numerous and varied – but this was absolutely the right approach to Cage, whose compositions are extremely numerous and varied, and the best possible sort of hundredth anniversary tribute.

The evening was headed by Ilan Volkov, in his capacity as principal Guest Conductor of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, but in fact Volkov only conducted three of the eleven pieces played, and the BBC SSO played in only four (the opening 101 requires no conductor). This was very much a team effort – and what a team it was, with the orchestra getting the mood completely right, and guests including the ever-excellent vocal ensemble Exaudi and numerous renowned Cage performers including pianist (and composer) Christian Wolff, pianist John Tilbury (soloist in the Concerto for Prepared Piano tonight), and electronic musician Takehisa Kosugi.

Volkov and his fellow organisers had done a great job in programming the evening: they managed to capture the scope of Cage effectively, which is no mean feat. The early Experiences II, sung movingly by Joan La Barbara, caught Cage in ecstatic simplicity mode with its simple, soft melodic lines. The two “number pieces”, 101 (1988, for 101 instrumentalists) and four2 (1990, sung by Exaudi), showed Cage as the cheerful controlling anarchist, giving the performers license to place their music wherever they like, within specific time brackets. And the longest piece of the evening rendered him superimposer as well as composer: Cartridge Music (1960), in which David Behrman and Takehisa Kosugi played with various objects near some microphones, overlapped with the orchestral Atlas eclipticalis (1962), which happened at the same time as the many-piano work Winter Music (1957). Confusing, yes, but still – like the other works – a beautiful space with music in it; somewhere to be calm, never confusing to listen to, no matter how long the pauses or how quiet or odd the noises. Cage is the master of the un-awkward silence.

There was also room for two non-Cage works: Christian Marclay’s new piece Baggage, which asks the orchestra to fiddle with their instrument cases and works very well, and an improvisation billed as Quartet by Behrman, Kosugi, Wolff and Keith Rowe. This was, for me, the one bad trip of the night, sonically denser than most of the Cage works and simply not as calm in effect. In three-and-a-half-hour Cage concerts, calmness really is everything. But this didn’t detract from the overall tone fo the evening, which was glowingly serene.

There’s a growing trend in Cage commentary to try to reclaim him as a composer, not just as a creator of brilliant and challenging ideas, as he is sometimes viewed. For me, this misses the point. Yes, his music is incredibly high-quality – but he is more than a composer. An evening like this proves that he doesn’t just make wonderful music; he makes you listen and think in new ways. Cage’s contribution is not only to music, but to everything – and that’s something to celebrate.