It would be easy to get blasé about the Proms. Another day dawns, another pantechnicon trundles up to the Albert Hall, disgorging another world-class orchestra to play yet another Shostakovich symphony, another Strauss tone-poem.

When the orchestra is Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, blasé is not an option. Yes, Shostakovich was on the bill, but both the orchestra and its principal conductor, Mariss Jansons, have pedigree in that department, and it showed last night. Opening with Haydn’s Symphony No 100, the so-called “Military”, Jansons sculpted rhythms with absolute precision, brushing up string textures nicely, manicuring woodwind solos with care. Yet for all the grooming, it felt, at least to begin with, rather sedate. The second movement, slightly darker, suited the orchestra better, while the percussion that gives the symphony its nickname helped to scuff the music’s smooth surfaces. Jansons saved the best for last, a four-man percussion escort marching across the stage to bring the symphony to a raucous close.

The Shostakovich that followed swept all reservations aside. His Tenth Symphony was completed shortly after Stalin’s death, but whether Stalin is its subject or not, it’s hard to avoid its anguish and its savage humour. Like someone picking at a scab, it hammers over and over again at a few short phrases. The Concertgebouw stripped the neuroses bare; the playing could be ugly or cartoonish, yet the collective virtuosity was unmistakeable, particularly in the screeching oboes, squealing flutes, aching bassoons and pleading clarinets.

The hallucinatory Scherzo was like a slap round the face, and it was greeted by a stunned silence; when the music finally stopped, the full house gave it an ovation born as much of release as of enthusiasm.

The previous evening, Magdalena Kožená was the soloist in songs by Henri Duparc. She is not one of your foghorn mezzos; her tone is bright, clear and sometimes almost weightless, seeming to emerge from within the exquisite orchestra. You had to take it on trust that she was singing in French, but she caught the music’s fragile ecstasy.

There was nothing fragile about Jansons’ performance of Sibelius’s First Symphony, which had craggy modernity as well as a soaring expansiveness, while the Concertgebouw found the ideal balance between refinement and sensuality for Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé. For two nights, it was possible to believe that the Concertgebouw really is, as the publicity claims, the world’s greatest orchestra.