Ralph Vaughan Williams worked long and hard to bring The Pilgrim’s Progress to the stage. Shortly after its apparently dismal 1951 premiere, he predicted: “They won’t like it. They don’t want an opera with no heroine and no love duets.”

How right he was; the opera has not been staged in London for decades. No doubt John Bunyan’s Christian allegory on which it is based seems tendentious to modern sensibilities, yet as this performance demonstrated the piece can be engrossing, at times even thrilling.

This was the centrepiece of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s series marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, and it pulled out all the stops.

The conductor was Richard Hickox, one of the composer’s most ardent champions; the orchestra, onstage rather than in the pit, was in top form; and it is hard to imagine anyone assembling a better cast.

Director David Edwards had devised a modest but effective semi-staging, within which the nearly two dozen soloists, meticulously prepared and performing without scores, sang and acted with fierce commitment. Add to that diction so clear that there was absolutely no need for surtitles, and what we got was a performance that would have graced any opera house.

The opera’s symbolism was made to seem no more ponderous than in Handel’s Messiah, Wagner’s Parsifal or, indeed, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which the production wittily evoked for the scene at Vanity Fair.

The agnostic Vaughan Williams stressed the story’s universality by changing the central character’s name from Christian to Pilgrim. Roderick Williams managed the difficult job of making him both an everyman and a flesh-and-blood figure whose troubles are painfully real.

He was magnificent but what made the evening special was the sense that cast, orchestra, chorus and conductor were single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of bringing the opera back to life.