The final instalment of the Proms’ Sibelius cycle was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, among the finest interpreters of the composer’s music. The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies formed the programme, and in each case Vänskä’s remarkable approach was much in evidence, with each work seeming to possess an organic life of its own, the music ebbing and flowing in an evolutionary process at once natural and logical, with little conscious awareness on the audience’s part of interpretative intervention – though paradoxically, of course, Vänska’s often formidable imagination was everywhere at work.

The usually heroic Fifth, however, was more muted and troubling than we sometimes experience it. The opening themes, coalescing out of fragmentation, seemed under constant threat of dissolution. The closing statement of the finale’s vaunting main subject emerged doggedly out of turmoil, its lofty majesty hard won at best. The playing took a few minutes to settle. Dynamics were sometimes extreme, the strings fading to near inaudibility at one point in the finale. Opening a concert with it runs the inevitable risk of subsequent anticlimax.

The Sixth and Seventh, however, were well nigh faultless. The ambivalent Sixth, in which emotional conflict simmers beneath exquisite, autumnal textures without ever fully rising to the surface, was done with a bracing clarity and a revelatory freshness of detail that left me wondering why it remains the least frequently played of the series. The Seventh was a statement of great nobility, its emotional trajectory immediate and superbly negotiated, the drama and logic of its single-movement structure admirably focused and taut. An outstanding second half, with Vänskä at his best and the playing wonderfully responsive and lucid.

• Available on BBC iPlayer until 16 September. The Proms continue until 12 September.