Marking the 40th birthday of the City of London Choir, this Remembrance concert was also a celebration - two elements you rarely find reconciled. But with war and peace as the theme, there was scope for a jubilant beginning in the form of Beethoven's Egmont overture - inspired if not by peace, then certainly by victory - and an ambivalent continuation in Haydn's Missa in Tempore Belli, which although indeed written in a time of war often sounds as though it is giving thanks for a peace already won.

Still, it's war that has always inspired the more interesting music, and the highlight of this programme, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the choir's music director Hilary Davan Wetton, was Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem. Juxtaposing poems by Walt Whitman with biblical texts, this strong, involving score paved the way for Britten's War Requiem a quarter of a century later. Perhaps it would be performed more often if the uplift of the final movement didn't, with hindsight, smack so much of complacency in a work written in 1936.

Here it began plaintively, but the prayer for peace, sung with silvery clarity by the soprano Lynne Dawson, was soon subsumed in a march that grew to encompass all the RPO brass and a bass drum that made the floor shake. The climactic central number, a moving setting of Whitman's Dirge for Two Veterans, also grew from nowhere, this time in a slow-burning crescendo that took account of each verse's ebb and flow.

The CLC, one of the capital's leading amateur choirs, isn't quite accustomed to venues as big as the Barbican; but if there were times in the Haydn when it seemed to need more heft, there was always something in reserve to surprise us with when it really mattered. And the choir's handling of the Vaughan Williams, the difficult chromatic lines tackled with secure intonation and clear, confident articulation, was an achievement of which it can be proud.