Mstislav Rostropovich was a friend of Shostakovich and his interpretations of the composer's work have a uniquely personal authority. His approach has been described as essentially political, examining the music's hidden agendas and exposing the bifurcations between outward expression and inner meaning.

His performance of the Tenth Symphony with the LSO impressed above all, however, with its sense of structural coherence. Written after Stalin's death in 1953, the Tenth is generally regarded as expressing both Shostakovich's relief at the dictator's demise and his fears for a still uncertain future. Given that the name of the composer's then mistress is encoded in the slow movement, the symphony can also be read as a demand that the permanence of love be maintained in the face of political transience.

The work's ambivalent emotions were, as expected, very much to the fore in Rostropovich's performance. Longing collided with fear in the first movement and was balanced by acerbic wit in the third. The scherzo was all crushing brutality, the finale elated yet uneasy. Yet throughout, you were also acutely conscious of the brilliant musicianship in which the score is grounded, of its shuttling deployment of motivic references between movements. Mahler is usually cited as the dominant influence on Shostakovich's symphonies: Rostropovich, however, laid bare a musical drama that more closely resembled Brahms in its logic and compression.

The First Violin Concerto that preceded it was markedly different. This too is a work in which structure is all-important, yet all too frequently it felt like an exercise in mood. The soloist was Maxim Vengerov, technically staggering and sounding like the voice of consolation over the penumbral orchestral mutterings of the nocturne and the passacaglia. Yet there was too little sense of the work's shape, and its remorseless impact didn't always hit home.