"I am not dust; mortal decay cannot touch me." The lines with which Shostakovich chose to end his Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, written the year before the conmposer died, have rarely seemed a more appropriate epitaph than at this concert. On the 25th anniversary of his death, the BBC NOW paid tribute with a devastating performance of the suite, paired with one of his largest works of musical architecture, the Eighth Symphony. Together they formed as searing and complete a personal testament as could be created in one concert.

Shostakovich approached Michelangelo's work as one artist to another, setting poetry speaking of love, protest and mortality, to eloquent vocal lines supported by sparing but tensely atmospheric orchestral writing. The stabs of percussion and rasping tam-tam of the eighth song, Creativity, so punchily played by the BBC NOW, were a world away from the muted strings and horn that opened the next song, Night. It was a luxury to have the Russian bass Sergei Leiferkus as the supremely communicative soloist, his richly-hued timbre full of light and shade, his sound vibrant and alive.

There's little of Shosta-kovich's trademark musical irony to be found in his Eighth Symphony, written in 1943: this is a profoundly sincere and personal work. Under David Atherton it received a performance of the immense scope and commitment that it so deserves.

The symphony is almost a concerto for orchestra - nobody, from the leader to the triangle player, can cruise along in the background. This egalitarian distribution of orchestral responsibilities here served to highlight how strong the BBC NOW is these days. Each detail of the score had a purpose, and what detail it was: the biting violin flourishes of the second movement; the belligerent viola entry opening the third; the eerie flutter-tonguing from the flutes in the largo. The wind and brass sections supplied some excellent solos, from Celia Craig's intensely sustained cor anglais melody to Philippe Schartz's third- movement trumpet tune, thrown out with the careless bravado of a Latin bandleader. Again and again Atherton wound up the tension until it seemed it must reach breaking point, the breathtaking climaxes swiftly collapsing and dissolving, so that, finally, of this great musical edifice only distant reverberations were left. A shattering evening.