Life’s never dull with Graham Vick, and the director took advantage of the Proms’ first-ever staged opera to bring a highly Vickian walkabout production of Britten’s “church parable” to London. And a most arresting event it was too, saving your honour.

These police were part of the show, of course: a Vick speciality, to startle the audience and bring it into the play. And Curlew River does indeed deal with a disappearance: the Madwoman is roaming in search of her son who vanished a year ago, and finally learns of his fate as she takes a boat across the river with a group of pilgrims on their way to visit a miracle-working shrine.

William Plomer made the libretto from a medieval Japanese Noh play, and moved the thing to the English fenlands, having it ritualistically performed by a group of monks as a celebration of God’s grace: the shrine turns out to be the boy’s, and his spirit comforts the mother.

Performing this as a police reconstruction might sound laughable but was far from it: it’s as close to ritual as we get in these days of Crimewatch and 999, and the cops arguably fulfil the same double-edged authority role the Church did in the Middle Ages. What Vick does is to abolish the distance of staged events: Mark Wilde’s Madwoman becomes every distraught bereaved mother with his banal little empty pushchair. And God ’s grace, in a hopeful post-religious vision, becomes a moment of human connection and sympathy as a section of the audience were brought to terms with their own griefs.

“Closure” has been too spuriously aired lately to have much currency, but this stark, dignified staging made something immediate from Britten’s contemplative drama. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group played the blurry music with delicacy, and the whole thing was a glimpse of how, with imagination, the Albert Hall can become a vividly contemporary space of shared experience, not just a Victorian barn.

Earlier, Kurt Masur and the LPO played the most tactile Schubert Unfinished Symphony, full of glimpses deep into the German Romantic forest, with Janácek’s bombastic Glagolitic Mass and his Hukvaldy Songs, as regrettable as the next folk-song.