Today, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays music to dodge daleks by at the Doctor Who Prom. But this, its first appearance this summer, was one of the season's hardest-hitting programmes so far: two responses to the events of the second world war, leavened only by Prokofiev at his most brittle.

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony tends to dwarf whatever it shares the billing with. Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, which opened the programme, is only a quarter of its length, but it proved a surprisingly effective counterweight. The music's heavy, loping tread, at first so oppressive, was transformed by the end of the final movement into something almost soothing. In the middle, the fast movement flashed by under Thierry Fischer's firm, exacting beat, the lines eventually fragmenting, shrapnel-like, into a series of one-note reports that exploded around the orchestra.

In the symphony, noises off conspired to make Shostakovich's portrayal of armies marching in Leningrad even more evocative: a helicopter circling as the endlessly repeated drum beat started; a police siren as it returned at the end. Fischer and his orchestra seemed to bring a new care to details of timbre and balance. His bigger achievement, though, was to keep this musical juggernaut moving in a high gear, avoiding mawkish indulgence.

In between came Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto. This wasn't, perhaps, the neatest performance of the many that Alexander Toradze has given, but it was exhilarating nonetheless, containing flashes of irresistible sweetness among the whizzes and bangs.