Of the conductors queuing up to pay centenary tributes to Shostakovich this year, Mariss Jansons has better credentials than many. For more than 20 years he was associate conductor of the Leningrad (later St Petersburg) Philharmonic, and through much of that period he worked alongside Yevgeny Mravinsky, the greatest of all Shostakovich interpreters. How much Jansons learned from Mravinsky's profoundly structural approach to conducting the symphonies was shown by the wonderfully coherent account of the Seventh that made up the first of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's two concerts at the Barbican this weekend.

Three months ago in the same hall, Valery Gergiev led the London Symphony in an assault on the Seventh. That was overwhelming in purely sonic terms, but Jansons and the Concertgebouw showed how much more there is to be extracted from that problematic score. Even the notorious "invasion" section of the first movement was full of detail; every element seemed freshly minted, whether it was the hobbled cello and bass accompaniment at the start, the beautifully phrased bassoon solo following it or the slithering trombones near the climax.

There was equal attention paid to every element of the subsequent movements, too, shedding new light on what are often thought of as merely makeweights in the symphonic scheme. Though Stravinsky's musical world might seem far distant from the overheated rhetoric of the Seventh, Jansons' reading suggested that his cool neoclassicism was a pervasive influence on Shostakovich at that time - not just in the austere chords that announce the slow movement but in the frequent diatonic string lines that seem to hark back to his ballet Apollo. Yet the grandeur of the symphony wasn't neglected, either. Jansons held the finale beautifully in check, giving a real richness to its elephantine return of the opening theme, before opening the floodgates to the full strength of his peerless orchestra in the final pages.