Prom 72: Chicago SO/Haitink/Perahia, Royal Albert Hall, London

Why was the Prommers' queue so long for this concert? Was it for Bernard Haitink conducting Shostakovich's titanic Fourth Symphony, or was it for Murray Perahia playing Mozart? At all events, this modest New Yorker, who made his home in Britain after winning the Leeds piano competition in 1972, has come to feel like a home-grown hero, not least because of the privations he's had to endure thanks to a hand injury whose cure went disastrously wrong.

Since nobody can match the crystalline translucency of his Mozart, expectations of how he would deal with that composer's Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor were high. After Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had laid out the musical landscape, Perahia moved in with expressive precision: his relaxed semi-staccato style sent the notes soaring up into the dome. He imbued the romanza of the second movement with intimate warmth, and his delineation of the variations in the third was vivid and persuasive. He finally got a roaring, stamping ovation: that queue had been for him.

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While it's hard to imagine anyone actually loving Shostakovich's Fourth, it's equally hard not to treat it with respect, since it embodies the central conundrum of Soviet music. Yes, Stalin crushed his composers, but somehow they went on producing: where are the West's symphonic answers to the symphonies of the great 20th-century Russians?

Shostakovich wrote this gigantic work in 1936, at a point when Pravda was gunning for him, and though regarding it as his credo, he was terrorised into aborting its premiere. It then spent decades gathering fame through samizdat piano reductions, before getting a triumphant Moscow premiere in 1961. Haitink and his players did it proud. Fury marked the shrill and strident opening, and fury pervaded it until its extinction, 67 minutes later. Each of the sections within its three huge movements felt like a work in itself: some were playful and others wistful, some ranted while others revelled in intricate fugal patterns, but the whole thing was at once fastidiously played and heroic.

BBC Proms continue to 13 September (0845 401 5040)