The bustle of the Strand, Westminster chimes, Thames barges: Ralph Vaughan Williams listed all these city sounds as inspiration for his A London Symphony, played by the Philharmonia and conducted by Richard Hickox in their Pioneering Pilgrim series, marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's death.

But Vaughan Williams's informal description of the slow movement is the most poignant and vivid: Bloomsbury Square on a November Afternoon.

Out of the sinking, foggy strings, a lone cor anglais is heard, passing its mournful melody from horn to woodwind, quoting - as Michael Kennedy's authoritative programme note tells us - a lavender seller's cry and the jingle of a hansom cab.

The movement is called Lento only in the score. RVW intended no pictorial literalism.

Of all his nine symphonies, the composer used to say he liked this, his Second, the best.

Yet it gave him trouble. He finished it in 1914 but was still revising it 20 years later.

Here we had a rare chance to hear the original version, regarded as sprawling compared with the taut later edition. Thanks to the Philharmonia's beautifully nuanced playing and Hickox's advocacy, it sounded not a note too long.

The concert opened with an edgy, spirited account of the brisk Symphony No8 in D minor, written late in RVW's life and making expansive use of bells, vibraphones and all the latest in tuned percussion.

Anthony Marwood was the impeccable violin soloist in The Lark Ascending, the ethereal rhapsody for strings voted number one in the Classic FM Hall of Fame for the past two years.

As this skylark soared away into silence, so the thought occurred, Vaughan Williams rises highest when at his poetic and descriptive best.

• The Pilgrim's Progress, Sadler's Wells, 20/22 June (philharmonia.co.uk).