The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s autumn season in its home base is a mixture of online-only performances and concerts with socially distanced audiences. It seems as if the repertoire for the live events will be more conservative than the streamed ones. As if to underline that, the orchestra’s chief conductor, Vasily Petrenko, began the online series with an all 20th-century programme with a distinct neoclassical slant and not the most obvious box-office appeal.

At its centre was one of Stravinsky’s most archetypal neoclassical works: the concerto Dumbarton Oaks, with its lean chamber-orchestra textures, chattering wind writing and striding, gawky themes. The RLPO had already shown that it had lost none of edge and precision after many months apart in the third of Hindemith’s Kammermusik series. Jonathan Aasgaard was the solo cellist in what is a rather rumbustious recreation of the 18th-century concerto grosso, with Petrenko adding just the right degree of objectivity to its utilitarian textures.

In its arrangement for string orchestra as the Chamber Symphony, Op 110a, Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet sometimes has a neoclassical edge to it as well. In both incarnations, it is a work full of autobiographical references, not only in the prominence of the DSCH motif, Shostakovich’s musical monogram, which appears in all four movements, but also through quotations from his other works, including his first and fifth symphonies and first cello concerto.

The string orchestra expansion gives extra resonance to those symphonic references, even if it’s at the expense of the original version’s wiry, more personalised anguish. (One of Shostakovich’s friends claimed the composer was contemplating suicide when he wrote the quartet in 1960, and intended the work as his epitaph.) If that sense of on-the-brink desperation was rather diffused, Petrenko and his orchestra certainly did all they could to extract maximum impact from its anguished climaxes.

•Available on demand (£) until 30 October.