Underestimate the Valery Gergiev effect at your peril. There was I, thinking I had just heard one of the year’s cruder and smudgier performances of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, when people started leaping to their feet all around me to acclaim the peripatetic maestro and his orchestra (if it was Wednesday it must have been the Vienna Philharmonic) like conquering heroes.

So who was right? Well, perhaps we all were. This is still an orchestra capable of conjuring meltingly beautiful things. Its string pianissimo in the slow movement, ethereally recessed yet lush, took one’s breath away. And Gergiev, even after six months in which he must have conducted more hours of Shostakovich than most conductors manage in a lifetime, is still capable of whipping up the most frenzied orchestral climaxes — shrill, ferocious and neurotically exaggerated, but incredibly hard to resist on a purely sensational level.

Yet even the finest bands need a clear indication of pulse to play in time. And it was hard here not to sense a direct link between Gergiev’s famously fluttering hands and the orchestra’s splodgy attack on so many chords, or even the percussionists’ inability to get their thwacks synchronised in the final few bars. On top of that were a series of small technical blemishes: first a split horn note, then a violin solo of debatable intonation, and finally, at the work’s climax, another blip from a trumpet.

But what really diminished the performance for me was a nagging feeling that orchestra and conductor were playing it for effect, not from the heart. When this work was given its premiere in 1937 Leningrad, people openly wept. Here it seemed like just another snazzy orchestral showcase.

Still, the performance had one thing going for it. It was a lot better than Gergiev’s interpretation of Mozart’s Linz Symphony. Sledgehammer dynamics, coarsely overpressed sonorities, penny-plain phrasing, no finesse, no elegance, and a helter-skelter hurtle through the finale: it was the reading of a conductor who clearly wanted to blow a raspberry at the period-instrument movement, without having anything original to say about Mozart himself. But that got huge applause too — so what do I know?