It seemed appropriate that the first orchestral concert of Manchester's Shostakovich retrospective should focus on the Fourth Symphony. Withdrawn by the composer for fear of charges of formalism before its 1936 premiere and unheard until 1961, the Fourth has come to assume symbolic status in the history of Shostakovich's politically embattled career. So much so, perhaps, that some have overlooked its often startling originality. This towering performance, with Vassily Sinaisky conducting the BBC Philharmonic, was a forceful reminder of its musical validity as well as its inherently subversive politics.

In its broadest outlines, the Fourth equates the Mahlerian language of imperial decline and religious apocalypse with the crushing force of Stalinism. The climactic barrages of sound, combined with Shostakovich's intermittent use of propulsive rhythmic figurations, also hark back to the constructivist avant garde of the 1920s, deemed suspect at the time of the symphony's composition. Without losing sight of the score's architectural coherence, Sinaisky pulled all the threads together to create a terrifying portrait of a world in which both positivism and emotion are brutalised. The BBCPO played as if their lives depended on it, and the orchestral sound, with screaming woodwind and savage brass, was pulverising and blindingly clear. Unlike some interpreters, Sinaisky finds little tenderness in the work's quieter passages, only a numbed grief and resentful anger. Even the percussion at the end of the scherzo sounded like a time bomb waiting to explode.

Its companion piece was Britten's Violin Concerto, another political work from the 1930s, its lyricism undercut by intimations of war in the nerve-ridden ostinati of its opening movement and the lamentation of its closing passacaglia. Tasmin Little was the faultless, intense soloist in a performance that exposed the score's ambiguities before coming to rest in a mood of querulous, hard-won peace.