With Diaghilev at the South Bank and Covent Garden, the imminent arrival of the Kirov, Mikhail Pletnev's Tchaikovsky marathon and Channel 4 turning Anna Karenina into a porn show, it seems that Slavonicism rules OK. Buried in all this, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Yakov Kreizberg have been indulging in a two-part series entitled The Russians.

Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody is twinned with Lutoslawski's Paganini Variations, both works for piano and orchestra. Rachmaninov's cantata Spring is coupled with Judith Bingham's The Temple at Karnak. It's a big, imposing piece full of relentless timpani beats and sepulchral tom-tom rolls suggestive of massive statuary.

Shostakovich was represented by two of his most undervalued symphonies, the Sixth and the Eleventh. Kreizberg refuses to see any hidden political agenda in the Sixth, presenting it as very much an abstract work. The result is beautiful, but a trifle cool. The politics of the Eleventh are hard to escape, however. Written in 1957, it is subtitled "The Year 1905", and depicts the abortive January revolution that year. Kreizberg, swivelling between desolation and ferocity, turns in a performance of such power that the symphony becomes a lament for the destructive forces unleashed by all violent revolutions. The real high point, however, was the pair of Paganini-inspired pieces. Peter Jablonski was the soloist. The finest of today's young pianists, he attacked Rachmaninov's Rhapsody with bravura, panache and mercurial wit.