Gianandrea Noseda is back with the London Symphony Orchestra for a ravishing London premiere of James MacMillan’s 2001 Violin Concerto No 2 and an exuberant Shostakovich Symphony No 12

Music need not express anything except itself. Yet, listening to James MacMillan’s 2001 Violin Concerto No 2 receive its London premiere at the Barbican, I strongly felt the existence of something behind the notes: a struggle between light and darkness, lyricism and stridency, or even (to put it in the context of the composer’s religious faith) good and evil.

MacMillan, however, like many British composers before him, prefers not to gives us many clues about the impetus behind his orchestral music. The notes must do the talking, and they certainly do. Written for, and dedicated to, Nicola Benedetti, who played it here with wonderful subtlety interspersed with fiery passion, the concerto casts the soloist as a voice of tranquillity, frequently assailed by blaring marches, frenetic woodwind gallops or timpani wallops. Blows from a malignant fate, perhaps.

But although the soloist is sometimes goaded into a kind of insistent repetition, as if restating a point of principle, she always re-establishes a calm, rhapsodic line. More than that, towards the end of this 25-minute work, individual orchestral players are pushed into the music’s foreground to duet with the soloist, as if in sympathy with this lone voice. That culminates in a ravishing passage in which the orchestra’s leader (here the excellent Roman Simovic) shadows the soloist’s passagework in sumptuous thirds, executed with telepathic precision.

Under the hyper-energetic direction of Gianandrea Noseda, who seems more and more determined to give himself a whiplash injury as the years go by, the London Symphony Orchestra provided an impeccable backcloth to Benedetti’s virtuosity. Then Noseda really sprang into action, arms whirling like windmills as he drove the LSO through Shostakovich’s Symphony No 12, The Year 1917.

Many Shostakovich fans hate this work because it does seem to be a celebration of Lenin and the Russian Revolution without any redeeming trace of irony or ambiguity. When confronted by a performance as exuberant as this, however, the best response is just to sit back and enjoy the noise. That said, the most effective bits here were the quietest: beautifully phrased woodwind solos and delicate string passages that sounded like nostalgic echoes of imperial Russia. Perhaps there is irony in the work after all.

The Times, Richard Morrison