High voltage Shostakovich 10 from Elim Chan and the BBCSO

The conducting styles of Yevgeny Mravinsky and Elim Chan couldn’t be more different: Mravinsky, white-tied, using minimal gestures, not a flicker of emotion behind his hawk-eyed stare; Chan, wearing her trademark black tulle maxi skirt, feet planted firmly apart, high voltage, throwing herself into the music. Both deliver great Shostakovich. 

Mravinsky conducted the 1953 premiere of the Tenth Symphony, the first completed since the death of Stalin and one stamped with the composer’s D-S-C-H monogram ( the notes D, E flat, C, B). The work formed the thrilling climax of Chan’s Barbican programme with the BBC Symphony, her first with the orchestra outside the BBC Proms. 

The Moderato first movement was a study in brooding intensity, Chan’s expressive baton shaping the mourning: keening bassoon, shrieking E flat clarinet, spectral piccolos scouring the wasteland, searching for answers. In the clarinets’ wistful waltz, she drew a clear distinction between piano and pianissimo in the strings’ accompanying pizzicato. 

From then on, Chan tucked her baton away, moulding the rest of the symphony with her hands, sometimes splayed, sometimes pointing a finger for precision. The BBCSO attacked the savage Allegro with hammer and tongs, brass and timpani landing their punches with ferocious precision. The nervy Allegretto was taken at a flowing pace, with superb horn calls in the “Elmira” motif, paying homage to a pupil, Elmira Nazirova, with whom Shostakovich was infatuated. 

Chan was a bundle of energy in the finale, the orchestra writhing in its grotesquery, the D-S-C-H motif thumped out in the triumphant coda, Shostakovich dancing on Stalin’s grave. There’s going to be a lot of Shostakovich programmed this year, the 50th anniversary of his death. I’ll be lucky if I hear a performance as gripping. 

The programme opened with the UK premiere of Elizabeth Ogonek’s Moondog, a wispy nocturnal vocalise. Deftly scored, with muted trumpets and a piano embedded alongside the ubiquitous bowed percussion, its celestial palette swooned and sighed, gently pulsing.

Britten’s 1938 Piano Concerto (revised in 1945) gets played much more rarely than his Violin Concerto. Perhaps it needs more advocates like Benjamin Grosvenor, on duty here in witty, sparkling form. It’s a peculiar work, written in four movements in a popular, jazzy style, more of a suite than a concerto. Virtuosic moments are rare; even the cadenza in the Toccata first movement has a dreamy, reflective quality among the many glissandos sweeps. 

Chan emphasised the sardonic flavour of the Waltz, not far removed from Shostakovich, who would later become one of Britten’s good friends. Grosvenor lent the Impromptu an improvisatory quality before dispatching the swaggering March industriously. The work is not quite a pianistic showpiece, but Grosvenor’s encore – the jazzy Precipitato from Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata – offered thrills and vigour aplenty.