For all its popularity, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony remains problematic. Written in the months after Stalin's death in 1953, is the piece a programmatic depiction of the horrors of life for an artist in the communist regime? Or is it rather a "purely musical" symphonic work, whose meaning is contained in the integrity of its architecture?

For Andrew Litton, conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the situation is clear: Shostakovich's symphony is the bare facts of its score. This was a performance of unruffled literalness. The Dallas orchestra made a beautiful, homogeneous sound, as the symphony was transformed into a virtuosic orchestral showpiece, with all trace of bitterness or irony erased. After most performances of the Tenth Symphony, the idea of an encore is an act of violence. But here, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 4 elided naturally with Litton's Shostakovich: polished, well-mannered and glib.

It's amazing to think that Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel, which opened Sinfonia 21's late-night Prom, was composed two years before Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. Kreuzspiel's engaging games of registral expansion and contraction are focused on the idea of music as pure sound. But Sinfonia 21 and Martyn Brabbins made this piece of utopian structuralism much more than cerebral abstraction. There was wit in Nicolas Hodges's piano playing, and warmth in the irregular bedrock of the percussionist's cymbals and drums.

Gérard Grisey's Partiels is even more rigorously constructed around the phenomenon of musical sound. An exploration of the complex acoustical layers contained within any single instrumental note, the work investigates the richnesses of the overtones of the double-bass's low E string. But the work's geological drama moves from a gradually changing sonic tapestry to a much more mysterious kind of theatre. By the end of the piece, Grisey explores the potential of the tiny sounds of rustling tracing paper and tin foil. Finally, percussionist Richard Benjafield, in a pool of blue light, raised a cymbal aloft, seemingly preparing for a shatteringly loud crash - but the piece ended in darkness and silence, just before the expected denouement. Sound, even for so meticulous a composer as Grisey, is never "pure".

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible