Fifty years ago, Ralph Vaughan Williams took up his pen at the age of 84 to write his ninth symphony. He died three weeks later. Fifty years on, to the day, a capacity audience of 6,000 gathered to hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Davis play the work as the grand finale to an evening of celebration.

Enthusiasm for Vaughan Williams in this anniversary year has probably never been higher since his lifetime. His music is being energetically talked up and audiences are eagerly responding, in our own age of anxiety, to his darker shadows and his searchings. This symphony is the synthesis and summation of all that had gone before. And Davis conducted it both with the authority vital to galvanise the visionary and the violence within the music, and with the spaciousness to free its elusive spirit, and grant it final ambiguity.

The evening had begun with the iconic Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: nine string soloists, high above the stage under the genially approving eye of Sir Henry Wood, were finely balanced with the main body of strings in the long resonances of the Albert Hall.

Wood himself was honoured in a performance of the Serenade to Music, written as a present for him from Vaughan Williams, in celebration of Wood’s 50 years as a conductor. This was the original extravagant, multivoiced version: and Shakespeare’s lines were carolled and chorused forth by 16 young singers, summoned to “sweet harmony” by Sarah Tynan’s golden soprano.

The evening’s centrepiece was Job: A Masque for Dancing, originally choreographed by Ninette de Valois, and seldom danced these days. In concert performance, the 45-minute work comes over as a unique symphonic poem of metamorphosed pastoral Elizabethiana: minuets, sarabands, galliards and pavans, by turn consoling and corroding the tormented soul of Job.

The mighty satanic organ usurped the throne of God; the saxophone (which was to reappear with two others in the symphony) was splendidly insinuating in its hypocritical compassion. And Davis created a movingly slow and glowing crescendo as Job emerged, blessed and borne up by that ascending lark of a violin that was ubiquitous throughout the evening. The concert will be broadcast by BBC Two on Saturday (7.05pm).

The previous night had offered more musical choreography in the form of excerpts from Prokofiev’s ballet, Romeo and Juliet. The Royal Philharmonic’s top team was on top form, with exquisite woodwind solos from Philippa Davies’s flute and Michael Whight’s clarinet – and with Daniele Gatti conducting both this and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony very much as a man of the theatre.

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