WHO on earth was responsible for dreaming up the dazzlingly ambitious concert dished out by the BBC SSO and Ilan Volkov yesterday afternoon?

One thing's for sure: only the BBC could have pulled off such an audacious project and drawn a healthy crowd to boot.

The programme featured exclusively the music of Stravinsky: six works in all, spanning almost the composer's entire career from before the beginning to the late 1950s and one of the most advanced pieces he wrote in terms of its musical language. Moreover, the afternoon feast was garlanded with a triple helping of Steven Osborne at his wittiest, steeliest and punchiest, all facets deployed with his inimitable power and clarity.

Each half of the extraordinary event was buttressed by a piece of musical gigantism from Russia's wee giant. It exploded with 60 seconds of thunder from wind, brass and percussion in The Song of the Volga Boatmen; then – after the interval – Volkov and band rollicked through Stravinsky's orchestration of Chopin's Grand Valse Brillante, written in 1909, the year before the composer's big breakthrough with The Firebird.

The strings gave a crisply stylish account of the Concerto in D, and otherwise it was Steven Osborne's afternoon. The pianist was in awesome form, and the SSO with Volkov in powerful alliance as Linlithgow's finest pelted joyfully through the Capriccio with its wonderful baroque second movement, the pointillistic Movements for piano and orchestra not remotely scary in the assured hands of Volkov and Osborne. The party was rounded off with a blindingly bouncy account of the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments: a storming close to a stunning afternoon.

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