A mark of great performances is that they enable one to see things in a new light. Last night’s second Prom appearance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle offered two such revelations.

The first movement of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is one of the supreme extended elegies of the repertoire but it had never occurred to me how its desolate expanses connect back to the bleak prelude of Act 3 of Wagner’s Parsifal. Or to the lugubrious opening of the final act of Tristan. Or to TS Eliot’s Waste Land, which invokes the latter.

Rattle made all this clear in a quite outstanding account of the movement. Particularly notable was the way he restrained his forces until he was ready to unleash them. In fact, the extended unfolding was a rapt communion between players and conductor: a categorical rebuttal of the nonsense about a rift.

One passage stood out: an inky black sonority produced by bassoon and contra-bassoon, joined by a tentative clarinet, like pebbles being dropped into the dark waters of a lake. Then came the climax, properly harrowing but with never an ugly sound. Here, as throughout, the brass were velvety.

A special word of praise for the principal horn for his superb articulation of the enigmatic five-note motif spelling out the name of Shostakovich’s soul mate, Elmira. But there was magnificent playing from the woodwind, too, both in solos and in the flawless voicing of chords.
The other revelation was Brahms’s Third Symphony, which Rattle demonstrated to be as interior and private an utterance as any of the composer’s. Once again, much of the first movement was spent in ruminative mode, Rattle listening intently to his players and coaxing small rocking motions in the music with his minimal gestures.

When the development section was reached, however, they shot off together, taking the score marking of “agitato” as a cue to explore the tension below the calm surface. The contra-bassoon was again encouraged to make a conspicuous contribution with some splendidly rasping bass lines. Normally the instrument is eclipsed altogether, though it plays a major role from the opening bars.

The Andante brought another sublime still moment, a tribute to the players’ technical control as well as to Rattle’s interpretative insight. The finale tied everything together with no lack of agitato but finally resolving back into the tranquillity of its opening.

www.bbc.co.uk/proms.