Barbican, London
There are two main reasons why Shostakovich's seventh symphony, the Leningrad, still struggles to get the attention and performances now routinely accorded to so many of its siblings. The first is its 80-minute length. The second, much more influentially, is the unresolved controversy about what the symphony, written during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, actually says.
Yet as performed by the orchestra, which, more than any other in the world, has this extraordinary wartime work in its blood, the most striking thing is that the symphony emerges as what it always said on the tin. Yuri Temirkanov and the St Petersburg Philharmonic performed Shostakovich's seventh as a work written on the frontline, in conditions of life and death, by a composer who might not live to finish it. Temirkanov is not a histrionic conductor – anything but – but the overwhelming quality of his gripping reading was the symphony's searing immediacy rather than any more calculated ambiguity. Even the famously derided march in the opening movement felt like what it really is, the unsubtle but also unironic writing of an artist on the edge, bent on his own and his city's survival. In this tremendous performance, the Leningrad symphony came over as a testament of survival in extreme conditions rather than as the inscrutable or ambiguous masterpiece that so many want it to be.
In the not entirely unpredictable absence of the long-advertised Martha Argerich, the first part of the programme had to be wholly recast. In Maxim Vengerov, though, Temirkanov was able to field a true super-sub. From the very opening bars of Prokofiev's first violin concerto, Vengerov was in masterly mode, nowhere more so than in the way he sinuously wove the violin line through the woodwind reveries at the end of the first movement.