Kamarinskaya - Glinka

Symphony No 1 - Shostakovich

Piano Concerto No 2 - Tchaikovsky

It was like old times at the NCH on Wednesday, when Alexander Anissimov conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in Shostakovich's First Symphony. Anissimov and his players were firing on all cylinders in a work which marked one of the most remarkable arrivals in 20th-century music.

Shostakovich, who completed it as his graduation piece in 1925, suggested it could be called a Symphony-Grotesque. And Anissimov's measured account kept it all in a fine balance between earnest gruffness and drollery, with, of course, something altogether more breath-catching in the slow movement. The faster movements can easily be tilted towards a lightness that's merely skittery. Anissimov showed himself fully prepared to make the most of the blacker components of the 19-year-old Shostakovich's musical personality, which, after all, the composer could express much more freely in the mid1920s than he would be able to for most of the rest of his life.

Glinka's Kamarinskaya, a seminal work in the history of Russian orchestral music - and praised to the skies by men such as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov - didn't fare quite as well at the opening of the concert. The performance had plenty of vim, but not enough subtlety of light and shade.

The virtues of Glinka in Kamarinskaya - his inventive recycling of material in everfresh contexts - can easily seem an over-stretching vice in the hands of Tchaikovsky in less than top form. With Olivier Gardon a ragged and over-taxed soloist, that was how the Second Piano Concerto came across - even in a truncated version and with Anissimov frequently in his best, swashbuckling mode. Although the cuts deprived us of the full measure of the violin and cello solos in the slow movement, it was still the orchestral playing which made the strongest impression in this performance.