Here was journey's end for Richard Hickox's Vaughan Williams concert series with the Philharmonia Orchestra, begun in the spring. A noisy end at that, for our ears rang with the obstreperous clamour of the Fourth Symphony - the only symphony in history to be sparked into life by a Times music review (commenting on abrasive symphonic trends). Vaughan Williams himself might have preferred Hickox's survey to end on a calmer, more transcendental note, but when the Philharmonia tautened and blazed in the finale, any undecided listener received venomous proof that the old boy's horizons stretched far beyond the stereotypes of mulched folk-song and ascending larks.

This was a concert dominated by war. The Fourth Symphony of 1935 prefigured the war to come; the Third, the Pastoral, of 1921 mused on the war just past, witnessed by the composer in the Royal Army Medical Corps. It's a pity in some ways that Hickox didn't leave the programme at that: the contrast between the in-your-face Fourth and the ruminative Third (so beautifully played) would have been much more acute.

Instead, we were shunted through a buffer zone with the choral cantata Dona Nobis Pacem, another war child of the troubled 1930s. I was glad to hear this rarity live: the London Symphony Choir were resplendent, and the sensitive soloists Lisa Milne and Alan Opie penetrated the heart of the texts, matted together chiefly from Walt Whitman and the scriptures. But, compared with the symphonies, the work seemed lolloping, unfocused, the pleas for peace flattened by its original purpose as a great choral shout for the Huddersfield Choral Society's centenary.

The Pastoral is a different matter. Hearing the plangent solos of the woodwinds and brass, or Milne's off-stage soprano hovering over the finale like a wraith, it was hard to understand how critics for decades imagined the composer to be gazing simply at Cotswold scenery, straw in his mouth. Hickox showed us that inside the symphony's meditative calm lay shell-shocked beauty and terrible grief. This was a masterfully engineered and moving performance: the best memory to take away from this Vaughan Williams season.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette