He kept us well in the frame, mindful of atmosphere, hungry for confrontation. In many respects it was a sensational performance.The seemingly innocuous little tune that slowly but surely infects the first movement was presented here without so much as a half-smile Flat, expressionless, staring you out. The LSO strings, resolute here under the baton of Mark Wigglesworth (his debut with the orchestra), played up the propaganda – heavy bows, big tone, stalwart, unflinching. There are those who would accuse Shostakovich of playing at melodrama in his Seventh Symphony. But feel the subtext: the resentment, the outrage, runs deep.
This symphony, the “Leningrad”, effectively begins before the great siege it was said to commemorate: Stalin and Hitler – they’re interchangeable.

The opening pages “read” like a propaganda poster: happy Soviets bounding towards a future of hard work, industrial growth and military might. Fiona Shaw spoke the words at the start of Thursday’s LSO concert, and she spoke them in semi-darkness, her tone sometimes agitated, sometimes strident, never melodramatic The truth isn’t. Akhmatova herself spent 17 months waiting for news of her “missing” son Stalin took him to punish her dissent. But her words knew nothing of conformity and cared less for blackmail Requiem was her testament to the “years of terror” Dmitri Shostakovich read it and honoured it And where the words ended, the music began.

How about a play where the audience rode around, too – working title: The Artful Dodgems!Paul Taylor. “In those years only the dead smiled/ Glad to be at rest:/ And Leningrad city swayed like/ A needless appendix to its prisons.” The words are those of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and there were many of “those years”. It’s like watching a boxing match in which both participants are on Zimmer frames. But then, according to Sierens, “an audience wants to surf on chaos, switch between extreme emotions.” In other words: check your brains in at the door, kids, and come and meet some role-models in a great big muzzy metaphor.To be honest, one of the main reasons the piece leaves you feeling frustrated is that you long to hop in a car and join the action. You’d never guess that life can offer a child other options that these extremes. Then, towards the end, she undoes her hair and starts disco-dancing with unsettling precocity alongside the rest of them. Let’s hope, too, that the acoustics are better at the Glasgow and Newcastle venues than they were at London’s Round House.The world the show reflects is a stunted one, and so, I suspect, is the show’s vision of it.