Each new work by Alfred Schnittke establishes him more firmly as Shostakovich's heir, a composer at once overtly rhetorical and deeply mistrustful of his own rhetoric, at once greatly daring in his expressive range and force and highly sophisticated in his ironic self-observation. His Viola Concerto, written last year, is a typical nightmare of the Romantic spirit, and it had a suitably full-blown, fiercely varied and dramatic performance from Yuri Bashmet and the BBC Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev at the opening concert of the Lichfield Festival.

Playing continuously for over half an hour, the work begins and ends with ruminative solo playing, punctuated at intervals by explosions of sound. At times the viola fantasizes about being a violin: an instrument of slightly uncertain character is especially valuable to a composer concerned with questions of authenticity, and the work has its main climax in an extraordinary passage of banal salon music for the viola in violin guise with piano accompaniment, further accompanied by dizzying layers of doubt in the slides and harmonies of the orchestra.

Bashmet's large-toned, noble performance, strictly in tune, added to the concerto's immense power in not over-playing either its elegiac monologues or its keen parodies. Gergiev, making his British debut, was also magnificently in control. There was a fizzing Ruslan overture to start, and later an account of Tchaikovsky's Fifth given with epic sweep, a Russian thrill and abundant life in subsidiary parts. It found the orchestra at full, hearty strength.