Daniele Gatti continues to be the best thing that's happened to the Royal Philharmonic in recent memory; and, from all appearances, he continues to achieve those results by working the players mercilessly. I've never seen the members of an orchestra look so collectively shattered as they did here after their music director had whipped them through Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, the climax of a demanding, all-Russian programme. But it was worth it; we were hearing the RPO at the top of its game.

In the first half, the players had been galvanised by the flamboyant presence of Mischa Maisky as soloist in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. Beginning with an almost gruff tone, Maisky's cello was soon soaring out to rise above anything the orchestra could pit against it, then ceding to an expressive horn solo. His was an intense, passionate performance that vividly brought out the work's desperation, with the unrelenting cadenza which forms the third movement at its fulcrum. If he didn't quite reach the depths of the concerto's dark, lonely heart, he came close.

It sounded weighty next to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, which had found the orchestra agile yet not with quite the required transparency in the first movement, and sounding a little portly in the third. Balance was not the strong point of the Tchaikovsky either; Gatti seemed to have little regard for it in an acoustic which, when the brass are seated as usual at the back, brings instant stardom to any trombonist who dares play above pianissimo. Yet if we could hear some of the symphony's bare bones it was none the worse for it.

Gatti generally favoured breakneck speeds, yet his pacing in the middle movements especially never faltered; here too there were some excellent wind solos, dark-toned clarinet and quirky yet elegant bassoon. As for the finale, even its most bombastic moments held their own all the way to the exhilarating end.