BBC Symphony Orchestra: Adams. Tippett, Shostakovich at Barbican Hall

Steven Osborne has won awards for his masterly recordings of Tippett’s piano music, noted for the intoxicating freshness, detail and illumination he brings to each work. The Piano Concerto of 1955 was written in the wake of his opera The Midsummer Marriage, and shares its sense of melodious ecstasy, finishing with a dazzlingly virtuosic Vivace. The streak of menace in Adams’s charming foxtrot from Nixon in China, darkens into fear in Shostakovich’s bitter, intense symphony, written in the depths of wartime Russia. Alexander Vedernikov, formerly of the Bolshoi Theatre, conducts.