St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra – St George's Hall Bradford

The St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra brought the two greatest Russian orchestral masterpieces to Bradford's St George's Hall this month.

This venue was itself recently described by the orchestra's patron Lesley Garrett as a jewel of a concert hall, and once pronounced in former days by our own Sir Thomas Beecham as the finest in the country.

As for this concert it was packed, and no wonder. We were to hear Tchaikovsky's B flat minor concerto which the Japanese world-class soloist Noriko Ogawa played magnificently.

Ogawa appears with all the major European, Japanese and US orchestras and she is also renowned as a recitalist and chamber musician.

Before her performance, we opened with Sibelius' Karelia Suite, rather slow to begin with but soon its stirring self. It also ended with some horn wobbles amid the remaining excitement.

Now the Tchaikovsky moment. During the composer's earlier days in 1874, the concerto's dedicatee Nicholas Rubenstein described it as utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable, trivial and vulgar.

A year later, after its first public performance in Boston by the legendary Hans von Bulow it immediately became known as noble, powerful, perfect, mature and stylish.

And in Ogawa's hands it sounded like the greatest of them all, and I'm not forgetting concertos by Rachmaninov, Mozart and Beethoven all played during the excellent current 2014/15 season.

After cooling off during the interval, the sombre first notes of the opening movement of the maestro's sixth and final symphony (Pathetique) sounded cruel.

"Even the lilting waltz and shattering march movements which followed could not stop a silent conclusion, for the famous composer was dead within days, probably by his own hand.

"But that did not stop the conductor Vladimir Altschuler from giving us an encore: Russian Dance Act 3, Swan Lake."

John Pettitt