In the three years since Mariss Jansons was appointed music director, he has turned a good orchestra into a great one. Their appearance at last year's Proms lingers in the memory as a great musical event. Now they are briefly back at the Barbican as part of the final stretch of a European tour. The programme, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Brahms's Second Symphony, showcases the orchestra's colouristic range.

Using Stravinsky's 1947 revision, Jansons turns Petrushka, romanticised by some, into a hard-edged modernism, in which excruciating emotions surfaced from beneath a gleaming veneer. The Shrovetide fair, its blocks of sound gradually locking together, was a constructivist saturnalia, orgiastic and chilly. The ballet's characters were sharply etched. The Charlatan was sinister and grotesquely funny. Petrushka's pathetic eagerness to please made you squirm in your seat and his final trumpet shrieks, emerging from an unusual, but telling, lull, shocked even if you know the score backwards. The ditsy Ballerina's music - Jansons does much with its absurdly exaggerated bassoon arpeggios - travestied Tchaikovsky.

The Brahms was also phenomenal. In an age when conductors are favouring a lean approach and Brahms is taken up by period bands, Jansons still sees him as an arch-Romantic. The orchestral sound was transformed, Stravinskyan stridency giving way to opulence. The emotions at the centre of the first two movements were intense, the finale - breathtakingly done - had the audience on its feet.