Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Steppe changes

It's not often that an orchestra gets the chance to play through all 15 of Shostakovich's symphonies. Some might say it would be like struggling across the steppes of central Asia. But there's one thing you gain from such a bumpy ride: you certainly get to know the Shostakovich style.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra have got as far as number 10. The chief lesson has been that we were right about these works; right to admire numbers five and seven, and never more right than to acknowledge the 10th as the outstanding masterpiece. It came at the right moment, at the start of the orchestra's winter season, and it revealed a band that has truly learnt the Shostakovich ropes.

Alexander Lazarev has a way of giving a strong lead, yet making space for these fine musicians to declare their own ideas. Within a carefully moulded structure, the starry woodwind soloists conjured magic. A hushed clarinet in the introduction, a tartly lyrical bassoon trio and a harlequinade of piccolos marked the stages in a terrific impetus to climax, the opening chords returning with a heavy weight of pathos.

The scherzo felt like a single, savage gesture, and it led to a slow movement of lonely disintegration, sadly chronicled by a heartfelt cor anglais and tentative horn. The gaiety of the finale was false, bitterly ironic. Lazarev never let the spirit of triumph get out of hand, and the closing thunderous statement of Shostakovich's private monogram seemed hysterical, paranoid. This is surely the truth of Shostakovich: noisy bombast for the ignorant Soviet mandarin, grimness and desperation to those in the know.

There were also two Tchaikovsky rarities, the symphonic poem The Tempest and the Moscow Cantata, written for the coronation of Alexander III. The first, with its obvious debts to Mendelssohn's Midsummer night's Dream music, seemed lukewarm. The cantata was a group of disconnected choruses and ariosi, sung by the solemn, abundant mezzo Nina Terentieva and the princely baritone Vladimir Redkin, with the solid backing of the RSNO Chorus. Neither made much impression; had they been by GA Macfarren or FH Cowen they'd be gathering deserved dust on a shelf.