Not content with taking charge of Covent Garden's current starry run of performances of Verdi's Don Carlo, Antonio Pappano nipped over to Italy at the start of this week to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in three concerts of Lutoslawski and Tchaikovsky. Now here he was, back at the Barbican already with the LSO in another programme altogether. Saturday night? Merely another Don Carlo. What a schedule.

Did the punishing regime show? Maybe just a fraction in the later stages of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, when the propulsion and theatricality of the finale seemed occasionally to overwhelm the balance and colour of the dazzling orchestral writing. But never for a moment in the gripping performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, which took up the first half of the concert and provided the more finished and wholly satisfying musical experience.

Pappano and the LSO certainly played their part in the unremitting focus of the Shostakovich, the winds interweaving eloquently with the solo violin in its bleak reflections. But this is a concerto in which the soloist is always the focus of attention, rarely permitted more than few bars of inactivity, and in Christian Tetzlaff it had an authoritative interpreter of the highest class. Whether it was in the long soliloquy lines of the opening movement or the almost hysteria-driven violence of the scherzo, or the hugely demanding solo cadenza between the last two movements, Tetzlaff was equal to all its demands. There are few violinists to match him at the moment.

Pappano kept a tight grip on the opening movement of the Tchaikovsky, bringing out the piece's ambiguous sense of menace by not pressing forward too soon. The slow movement and the balletic waltz were exceptionally well-judged and controlled, too, with fine horn playing, before Pappano – his instinctive sense of theatre gaining the better of his symphonic judgment – let the players off the leash in the finale.

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