Lest anyone imagine that Shostakovich's 10th Symphony could be taken more lightly than when it was written, after Stalin's death in 1953, conductor Kyrill Karabits had his own way of making the point. Taking the podium, he waited, and waited. Only when a deathly silence had fallen over the Colson Hall did he launch the opening cello line with its air of foreboding. The effect was riveting, and a strong indication of Karabits's deep sense of purpose.

The relationship between the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and their principal conductor is only in its second official year, but it is their seriousness of intent that marks them out. Balancing iron grit with the implicit anguish of the composer's four-note cipher woven tightly into the fabric of the music, Karabits steered a course through the first movement that realised both the moments of Shostakovich's highly individual expression and his symphony's positively Mahlerian scale. After the touch of explosive fire in the scherzo, the third movement's more sombre lines built their own tension. Only the slow introduction to the finale lost momentum, but this was quickly regained in the fast and furious Allegro, where the defiant assertion of self and ethos could not fail to leave its impression.

Earlier, Karabits had brought to Beethoven's First Symphony a similarly crisp and incisive delivery. Only the central work, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, disappointed. Soloist Frank Braley, highly regarded in his native France and looking like a musketeer, was most poetic in the Adagio assai yet, overall, lacked the thrust to carry the work off with total conviction.