The Westdeutscher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra could best be described as the German equivalent of the BBC Philharmonic. Like its UK counterpart, the Cologne-based group is a formidable ensemble that puts many of its better-known competitors to shame. Associated in the past with such towering figures as Erich Kleiber and Joseph Keilberth, the orchestra now has as its chief conductor Semyon Bychkov, a musician whose approach combines intelligence and insight with grandeur and emotional sweep.

His programme consisted of Bruch's First Violin Concerto and Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. The latter, for all its familiarity, is difficult to perform successfully. Its status as a work of anti-Nazi resistance should not blind us to the fact that it is not as great a work as the symphonies immediately surrounding it: it lacks the garish brilliance of the Sixth and the deep moral and political probing that characterises the Eighth.

However, Bychkov's interpretation was startling and innovative. The dominant tone was one of grief rather than rage, and the work's emotional centre was located in the spectral dances of the scherzo and the ritual mourning of the adagio. The climax of the notorious first movement, meanwhile, came not with the pulverising repetitions of the so-called "invasion" theme, but with the horrific distortions of the opening material that immediately follow its sustained appearance. The WDRSO's sound was spacious and smooth. Some might prefer more abrasion in this work, but the sonic richness highlighted Shostakovich's debt to Mahler and Tchaikovsky.

The soloist in Bruch's Concerto was Sayaka Shoji - weighty in tone, darkly lyrical and rhapsodic in approach. She compensated for some rhythmic unsteadiness in the first movement with glorious playing elsewhere. Bychkov's brooding conducting, meanwhile, turned a work that many dismiss as an overfamiliar warhorse into a high-Romantic statement of remarkable power and efficacy.