Stravinsky stated that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all". Yet he referred to the Symphony in Three Movements (1945) as a "war symphony" and actively encouraged audiences to hear in its music goose-stepping stormtroopers and allied victory.

Few performances quite disguise the work's piecemeal composition – the juddering intrusions of the piano are a hangover from an incomplete concerto; the seraphic musings of the harp salvaged from an aborted film score. Yet it doesn't require a wartime allegory to hold it together so much as an iron-willed conductor; which it found in Vasily Petrenko, whose pulverising performance honoured the work as the first great masterpiece of Stravinsky's American career, seemingly by nervous energy alone.

Several orchestras have made a strong case for Liszt's symphonies and tone poems in this bicentenary year; yet there can be little argument with the placing of the two piano concertos at the centre of his achievement. The excitable young Czech pianist Lukáš Vondráček was not shy of flamboyant Lisztian gestures – his fingers leaped from the keyboard as if it were red hot – but the outstanding passage was the intimate conversation with the cello, played with shiveringly beautiful tone by Jonathan Aasgaard.

Rachmaninov's Third Symphony is a work that has never gained much affection – too Romantic to appease the modernists, too modern to please conservatives – but the composer's sister-in-law rightly identified that "it is a work about Russia and our devotion to our beloved country". Petrenko chose the piece to commence his sixth season with the RLPO; and though he is well settled in Liverpool, it is on inspired nights like these that he seems to miss St Petersburg terribly.