The Ukrainian Kirill Karabits takes up his appointment as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s new principal conductor only in the 2009/10 season, but already the 31-year-old seems to have attracted a devoted following at Poole’s Lighthouse — the BSO’s home concert hall — judging by the ovations that greeted his masterly account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 11, “The Year 1905”, in the first of three programmes he gives this season as principal conductor designate.

Last summer, I heard him live for the first time at Glyndebourne, where he took over performances of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onyegin from the festival’s music director, Vladimir Jurowski, and, on minimal rehearsal, managed to impose a quite different interpretation — less romantically expansive, more classical and dramatic — on an electrifying London Philharmonic. This was no assistant conductor’s Onyegin, faithfully in the mould of the resident maestro, but a young man with clear ideas of his own.

On the podium, Karabits seems initially less charismatic than Jurowski — a slight, trim figure whose features, in profile, recall the young Shostakovich — but it is clear from his Glyndebourne work and from this BSO concert that he galvanises musicians. His predecessor in Bournemouth, Marin Alsop, brought the orchestra back to the front line of the UK’s regional bands, but on this evidence Karabits has the potential to take them further.

The 11th is a rarity among the Shostakovich symphonies, but after this enthralling performance, it was hard to understand why. The composer wrote it in the late 1950s, ostensibly to commemorate the massacre of demonstrating workers outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in January 1905, although those who seek to argue that there is invariably a samizdat subliminal message in mature Shostakovich claim it was a response to the brutal suppression of the Hungarian rising by Soviet troops in 1956. Whatever the truth, it is a cry of anguish and rage against military might, and one of his most vivid pieces of scene-painting.

Karabits’s gestures may be economical and unflashy, but he leaves no doubt about his ability to control massed forces, as demonstrated thrillingly in the crescendo produced by the full armoury of the percussion section in the terrifying “scherzo”, in which Shostakovich illustrates both the horror and banality of indiscriminate killing. The BSO players had the audience on the edge of their seats here, and we listened with hushed intensity to the moving threnody for the victims of the massacre in the symphony’s slow movement.

The last movement, the Tocsin, again brought forth Karabits’s ability to make a drama in purely sonic terms, building to a shattering climax, with resplendent bells almost making the hall shudder. The audience didn’t seem to realise what had hit them at the symphony’s abrupt close, but their enthusiasm grew every time Karabits returned to take a bow. In his native repertoire, at least, he is clearly the business.

The concert’s first half was devoted entirely to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the solo part played with immaculate good taste and musical manners by the Canadian James Ehnes. There may be more “characterful” interpreters of this central masterpiece, but few are as consistently satisfying as Ehnes, with his sweet, singing tone, easy virtuosity and expansive grasp of the long first movement’s massive architecture. It will be interesting to hear what Karabits achieves in a wider repertoire than this — he returns in February with Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, Kabalevsky’s rarely heard Cello Concerto and Dvorak’s Symphony No 8 — but for now the portents are mouth-wateringly good. Lucky Poole!

At the Royal Opera House, Rolando Villazon has returned to the scene of his international triumph four years ago as the haunted romantic — but unlucky in love — hero of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Nobody who saw him in the role back in 2004 will forget his little leaps of joy as the house erupted in ecstasy at his solo bow. This time round, he seemed more subdued and circumspect, grateful rather than surprised, a reflection, perhaps, of the personal crisis that affected his voice in the summer of 2006 and forced him to take a six-month sabbatical.

His Don Carlo at Covent Garden last summer suggested that he still had some “issues” of voice and nerve to be conquered, but, while it would be untrue to say that he is back to his 2004 form, his histrionic engagement with Hoffmann and the intensity of his acting again wins all hearts, even if the tone sounds greyer and his approach to high notes more cautious than before. For me, he remains the best Hoffmann Covent Garden has seen since Placido Domingo “created” the role in the venerable John Schlesinger staging in 1980.

The production remains lively enough, though William Dudley’s sets could do with a lick of paint and brighter light. The conductor was the RO’s music director, Antonio Pappano, who brings more romantic fervour than sparkle to Offenbach’s fascinating, if uneven, score. Apart from Christine Rice’s voluptuously sung Giulietta in the Venice act, Villazon’s co-stars were hardly of the standard one expects at Covent Garden.

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