Amid the wall-to-wall Shostakovich in the composer's anniversary year, the South Bank's weekend of concerts and films took a potentially more interesting angle,exploring his legacy to his successors in the former Soviet Union.

Two of the best known are Sofia Gubaidulina and the late Alfred Schnittke, whose works bookended the Arditti Quartet's early-evening programme. But the angry opening of Schnittke's Quartet No 2 had seemed merely noisy, coming after the Quartet No 1 by the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov. This 20-minute movement grows from a strikingly beautiful passage that has the simple intensity of a late Beethoven slow movement.

It proved more interesting than the two Silvestrov works the London Sinfonietta included in their later concert, under Reinbert de Leeuw. The 1965 Symphony No 2, in its UK premiere, seemed very much under Webern's influence; his Ode to a Nightingale, sung by Susan Bickley, sets a Russian translation of Keats's poem to sonorities that dissolve into chirruping woodwind. But each line follows an almost identical pattern - and it is a long poem.

The programme had peaked at the start, with violinist Andrew Haveron's bravura playing in Gubaidulina's Dancer on a Tightrope. John Constable played the strings of his piano with a glass, making them sound like a celesta, then a zither, then a bag full of teaspoons.

The evening ended on a low. Galina Ustvolskaya was closer to Shostakovich than any of these composers, which makes the numbing awfulness of her Three Compositions even harder to take. The second composition is for eight double basses, piano - and, here, a wooden box, pounded deafeningly and remorselessly with a mallet. Apparently the coffin Ustvolskaya stipulated didn't make quite the right sound. The most impressive thing was that the performers managed to keep straight faces.