This concert began the penultimate leg of Valery Gergiev's Shostakovich cycle at the Barbican, and for good measure he threw in Mozart's Symphony No 36, written at full tilt in 1783.

Mozart in a hurry was often Mozart at his best (you could say the same about Gergiev), and the symphony's carefree swagger all but conceals its emotional depth, a dichotomy that is also in Shostakovich.

In the event, the performance was an odd mix of the angular and the soft-centred, but while even a slimline Vienna Phil carried surplus ballast, the woodwinds were in stylish form, lending a vocal quality, by turns sardonic, wheedling or mournful, that was almost operatic.

But Mozart was the make-weight. Gergiev's Shostakovich was what filled the hall. As soon as he took the podium for the Fifth Symphony, the increased urgency of his movements changed the atmosphere, his wild exhalations making him an auxiliary member of the wind section: this is music that he almost literally breathes.

The symphony's mood-swings are violent, but Gergiev grasps the logic that shapes the lurches. If the Vienna Phil (now at full strength) lacks the fiery rasp of the great Russian orchestras, its legendary finesse, at times stretched to breaking point, registered every detail with fearsome clarity: the ponderous tread of the opening movement's marche macabre, the drunken lilt of the fiddle's dance bubbling up in the Allegretto, the woodwind filigrees that suggest an inevitably doomed optimism.

Gergiev insists that Shostakovich's symphonies (none more than the Fifth) document an inner struggle against Soviet tyranny. You do not have to agree to be overwhelmed by such an intensely realised performance.