Brighton Festival

DRAGON. The myth means much or little; by turns an aggressive and passive creation, and Alison Kay, 35, let one loose on the Brighton Festival audience. Beneath the decor of the Royal Pavilion Music Room, her new composition was played by pianist Leon McCawley with the Emperor Quartet.

In the interval, she revealed that the actual inspiration was the huge Chinese one breathing out the huge chandelier in the Banqueting Room above the audience taking their interval wine. She had been given the chance to create the piece for this very occasion, it took two months to write and was a fascinating eight or nine minutes of power, tension, fire, roaring anger, reverie and repose - all in the average day's life of a Dragon.

The textures and energies of the strings and the deep, clustered sonority of the piano made substantial brush strokes in conveying the inevitable extremes, the physicality and the paradox. The underlying feeling was of power held in readiness. The dragon was not so displeased with his audience that he wished to dispose of it.

McCawley gave a crisp and brisk performance of Mozart's Piano Sinata in G K283 to open a programme that ended in the vigorous splendour of Schumann's Piano Quintet in Eb. In between, the Emperor revealed the veiled gravity and anguish of a wife-grieving composer in Shostakovich's String Quartet No 7 in F sharp minor.

Post-perestroika and Berlin Wall, more than a decade beyond, we are yet still digesting the bitter passions and ironies of this composer's most personal utterances. And the Festival two days later presented a whole evening of his work to mark his centenary. The Philharmonia Orchestra's touring programme under conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy gave a capacity 2,600 Dome audience the chance to commune more wholly with Shostokovich's complex and beleaguered mind, soul and art in a four-part examination erupting with the showy and appeasing Festive Overture.

Assisting were attentive Scottish soloist Steven Osborne in the friendly, witty, spiky and playful Piano Concerto No 1. And Steve Isserlis with the purturbing and emotionally probing Cello Concerto No 1. Contrasting with the neat Osborne was the large mop of Isserlis hair, tossed around like Paganini's undoubtedly did as the composer asks the Rostropovich-tailored solo part to behave with the attack and agility of a violin.

His engrossing delivery of the protracted and intense cadenza hinted at why Isserlis was the choice of British composer John Taverner for his The Protecting Veil, for cello and orchestra.

Askenazy concluded with Shostokovich's Ninth Symphony with its ascerbic and ironical cynicism about Stalin's demand that he elevate and laud the Russian role in the allied victory of the Second World War.

Bassoonist Meyrick Alexander came under a telling spotlight for the solo that took the listener inside the pain and sorrow of a composer who in his time had feared for his life because the state dare not let the people know his true thoughts.

Richard Amey