Royal Albert Hall, London
3 out of 5 3

Among this year's bonanza of musical anniversaries, what would have been Alfred Schnittke's 75th birthday has so far passed almost unnoticed. The London Philharmonic is planning a modest celebration later in the autumn, but the Proms got in first with the UK premiere of Nagasaki, introduced by the London Symphony Orchestra and its chorus, under Valery Gergiev.

Nagasaki was Schnittke's graduation piece, composed at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. It's a cantata of sorts, setting Russian poems (a mix of Japanese in translation and Soviet doggerel) for chorus and a large orchestra that includes a rare outing for a theremin, with a solo mezzo soprano (Elena Zhidkova) in the fourth of the five movements. Though the piece was later officially condemned for its moments of expressionism and for "forgetting the principles of realism in music", it's a perfectly fluent but totally anodyne piece of Soviet tub-thumping. Borrowing heavily from Shostakovich, Prokofiev (especially Alexander Nevsky) and even Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, it ends with a great plea for world peace that could just as easily have been written to celebrate a bumper year for tractor production.

Gergiev ensured that the performance was utterly secure, but his main business of the evening was Shostakovich's massive Eighth Symphony, carved in a single unbroken arc from the slowly pulsing opening to the ebbing hesitancy of the closing pages.

The LSO's playing was outstanding, with the crucial wind solos (cor anglais, trumpet, bassoon) all beautifully delivered, but something was missing. Surprisingly for Gergiev, perhaps, the performance lacked a real theatrical charge: there was nothing feral about the scherzo or epically tragic about the close of the first movement. For once, he steered clear of extremes.

The Proms continue until 12 September. Details:

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