Prometheus Overture - Beethoven

Vier Letzte Lieder - Strauss

Symphony No 7 (Leningrad) - Shostakovich

Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony was a huge hit when new, both in the Soviet Union and the US, where conductors jostled for the privilege of playing it. It didn't take long to fall into disrepute. The great Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky once said the composer had, in its march, created an image of stupidity and crass tastelessness.

But in recent years the piece has been gaining favour again, as part of the reassessment prompted by the publication of the composer's purported memoirs, essential reading even though his widow has decried them as fake.

Half a century ago, the Leningrad Symphony was thought to depict Hitler as the enemy. Now we are to believe it was aimed at Stalin. The music remains the same: relentless, numbing, overlong.

The Estonian conductor Eri Klas, who is conducting the work on tour, sounds like a man who has few reservations about the piece. His pacing of it on Monday was sober. The unpleasant excesses of the music never caused the sound to congeal, yet the grip was always firm, and Klas found a range of responses from the strings that no conductor in my experience has managed with this orchestra.

There were some rather rougher patches of playing in both of the other works, yet Beethoven's overture to Prometheus, launched with tight, assertive, opening chords, was done with a sense of occasion, and the atmospheric writing of Strauss's autumnal Vier Letzte Lieder was mostly captured with understated lushness. Franzita Whelan conceived the work on a rather larger scale than the conductor, the sharp tilts of her phrasing bringing a flavour of Wagnerian excitement, which delighted the capacity audience.