As part of its Sound Adventures initiative, the London Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov began its Barbican programme with a short new opener by a young composer. The title of 30-year-old Emily Hall's Plinth refers to the fact that she saw her work as a support for the two major works in the concert, and that "a plinth is the thing that always sits there and is looked at but forgotten".

In the event, such a view of the piece seemed too self-effacing. Plinth made a strong impact, thanks to Hall's clear and well-directed harmony and her strong feeling for orchestral textures. Indeed, its hard, percussive external surfaces and neat construction offered a closer analogy to the title than perhaps she imagined. In its matching of means to ends, it exactly fulfilled its purpose.

The first of the two big pieces it preceded was Bartók's Viola Concerto, left in the form of sketches on his death in 1945 and subsequently made ready for performance by his colleague Tibor Serly. It retains its place in the repertoire, though the result lacks the disciplined focus of the scores Bartók himself finished. The soloist was Yuri Bashmet, whose large and subtly flavoured tone conveyed the essence of the work's strongest element, Bartók's thematic material, especially in the wild folk-dance finale. But in the introverted slow movement, too, Bashmet's simple, unaffected eloquence sought out the music's expressive heart.

Volkov accompanied him expertly before letting the LSO loose on Shostakovich's mighty Tenth Symphony. He is not an ostentatious conductor, and the torment and tenderness of this complex and often enigmatic piece registered all the more powerfully for his refusal to add false theatrics to Shostakovich's compellingly dramatic diary of a Stalin survivor.