For two years in succession, Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra opened their new season rather playfully with semi-staged operas. This time, they began with a broad sweep of Russian music and what felt like a plunge into the deep end of the repertory with Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony.

Glinka's overture to Ruslan and Ludmila was a deceptively breezy prelude. The crowd-pleaser of the programme was Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and, with the super-sleek Janine Jansen making light of the work's pyrotechnics, there was almost a sporting element here, too. Yet the hushed tones Jansen brought to the beginning of the violin's exposition were a reminder that this concerto is as much a hymn to Tchaikovsky's composition pupil, violinist Yosif Kotek, as it is to the instrument. In the finale, Jansen threw caution to the wind and Oramo followed suit, the pair engaging in a wild and furiously flamboyant Russian dance without ever losing their balance.

After the interval, the sense of a physical assault on the senses with the opening of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony was shocking, which made the chill of the string writing that followed doubly disquieting. It set in train a performance in which Oramo's unerring instinct for architectural shape was paramount: his ability to make the dynamics even more extreme a crucial facet, his ear for precise detail another. Even more telling was a profound sympathy for the Shostakovich who was striving to express intrinsic artistic truths, clinging to a belief in humanity in the face of Soviet inhumanity. That struggle seemed to be articulated in every instrumental solo, with the CBSO principals achieving a compelling immediacy in their playing, a terrible tension always implicit. So when the flute's final choking notes against the pizzicato double basses faded away at the end, the nothingness was shattering.