How to breathe fresh life into an old warhorse like Grieg's A-minor Piano Concerto? For German pianist Lars Vogt, the answer is to treat the work like an improvised rhapsody: to oust all stock gestures and blow strange, dark drama in their place.

Vogt's performance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Donald Runnicles was steely and volatile, not always comfortable but totally gripping. He pulled around phrases with the authority of someone who doesn't suffer compromise – it was wilfully fitful, refusing to settle even when Grieg offers respite (the tender Adagio was sumptuously played by the strings, but thorny from the keyboard). Vogt's casual gloss through chunky passages sounded borderline flippant, and in tuttis he turned to eyeball the orchestra as if defying them to wallow. Yet his glassy touch and cool detachment brought a stark, chilly grace to the work, and his sense of flux was breathtaking – the simple second subject of the opening movement had the loose beauty of a Brad Mehldau ballad.

Chilly discipline also underpinned the performance of Shostakovich's First Symphony that Runnicles conducted after the interval. If there's latent panic in this fragmented score, it was never foregrounded here: Runnicles kept the tension simmering and played the bizarre, bitty non-sequiturs absolutely straight. The end of the second movement was brutally abrupt, while the third – often played with a constrasting warmth – retained the same austere edge. The orchestra responded with ferocious drive.

The concert opened with a sprawling and innocuous sea-inspired work called Newly Drawn Sky by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis. A mush of forgettable chords and angsty squalls, Runnicles called it a masterpiece; considering the BBCSOO leads the field of contemporary orchestral music, it was a dubious choice from their chief conductor.

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