The scene is the Royal Festival Hall, London. The occasion is a concert to mark the centenary of Vaughan Williams’s birth – 100 years to the day, on October 12, 1972. The orchestra is the London Philharmonic; the conductor is Sir Adrian Boult, VW’s most distinguished living champion, the dedicatee of the concert’s final item and, at 83, the same age as VW when he completed his Eighth Symphony. The BBC recording, broadcast six days later, does not include the National Anthem, with which all Royal Philharmonic Society concerts open, nor, alas, On Wenlock Edge with tenor Richard Lewis, as the BBC did not film it.

The DVD thus begins – and somewhat disconcertingly – with Sir Adrian arriving on the podium and looking distinctly annoyed with something in the auditorium. After a whispered exchange with leader Rodney Friend, we’re off into the shortest but one of the most fascinating and arguably underrated of VW’s symphonies: four movements labelled Fantasia (Variations without a theme), Scherzo alla Marcia (for wind instruments alone), Cavatina (for strings alone) – its theme resembles the chorale ‘O sacred head sore wounded’ – and Toccata, with its array of percussion instruments. But it is Job that is the highlight (and main selling point) of the DVD, a wonderfully robust performance with selected images from Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job punctuating the telecast, the Festival Hall organ contributing a startling coup de theatre in ‘A Vision of Satan’ and Sir Adrian guiding the conclusion of ‘his’ work to a trademark VW niente that is quite spellbinding.

In one sense, he is the least interesting of conductors to watch, the very antithesis of Bernstein’s terpsichorean style and perhaps only rivalled in economy of gesture and facial expression by Richard Strauss; on the other hand, one constantly wonders how he achieves the miraculous effects he does by such minimal means.