Storytelling. Impact. Gamechanger. Inspiration. These were the titles of four of the categories at this year's Royal Philharmonic Society Awards.

Such terms, of course, could apply equally well to the greatest music and music-making of any year throughout the more than two centuries since the RPS was founded in 1813. Telling stories, inspiring listeners - that's what music does. And if Beethoven – whose Symphony No 9 the RPS commissioned – wasn't a gamechanger, who was?

The RPS Awards have long shone a light on projects and events which might otherwise have stayed in the shadows, for being smaller or simply local, but whose impact on audiences and participants can be no less profound – and sometimes more so – than a famed virtuoso in a world class auditorium. But that almost a third of this year's 13 categories, which were announced last night at London's Wigmore Hall, so specifically focussed on music's potential impact – to use another of those terms – on communities, on society at large, on people and places, lent this year's event a perhaps polemical, and certainly timely, feel. They were, then, Awards as much about what music does, as what it is - and taken as a whole offer a powerful retort to anyone who might ever suggest classical music is a detached art form.

Such a spirit ran through the winners and shortlists of even the more prosaically titled categories. The Chamber-Scale Composition Award was given to Laura Bowler for Wicked Problems, a work confronting climate change. Jennifer Johnston took the Singer Award for her work as Artist in Residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and for developing digital platforms to keep creativity alive during Covid. And through her educational and carefully-judged public interventions, the tireless Nicola Benedetti – this year's Instrumentalist winner – stands head and shoulders above pretty much any other star soloist when it comes to harnessing the possibilities of music to shape and transform lives.

Another term, incidentally, was nicely thrown into proceedings by the winners of the Young Artist Award, the superb Hermes Experiment. When your line-up consists of a singer, harp, clarinet and double-bass, the need to commission new works is something of a given – but what a catalyst for creativity it's been. Experiment: that could be an intriguing new additional category for another year.

And while, like them, many of the winning projects were not directly related to Covid – such as Bold Tendencies, which hosts classical concerts in a Peckham multi-storey car park, or Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason's account of the raising of her remarkable family, House of Music – this year's event still felt, understandably, a pandemic Awards. Few were the recipients who hadn't engaged with the Covid-crisis in some way, bringing comfort or camaraderie in challenging times. Or even, in the case of the Impact Award, actually affected people's health: the winner, ENO Breathe, having worked with Imperial College Healthcare to use singing techniques to help those recovering from Covid address their breathing and anxiety.

It will be everyone's hope that next year's RPS Awards might be a properly post-pandemic one. But if so, we might also hope that the discoveries made as we navigated the past 18 months about what music can achieve beyond the traditional concert hall – rightly celebrated last night – aren't swiftly forgotten, and will continue to form a part of musical life when it returns to easier, happier times.

A full list of winners of this year's Royal Philharmonic Society Awards can be found at the RPS website.