Hot-ticket International Festival regulars, the London Symphony Orchestra were back for a week-long residency taking in orchestral music, chamber music, choral music and opera. For the first time in Edinburgh, they appeared with Chief Conductor, Antonio Pappano, now in his second season in that particular role but with a long time LSO association. Who knows where he will take them in the years ahead, but at the Usher Hall, Beethoven’s ‘5th Symphony’ (surely one of the world’s most well-known pieces of orchestral music) sounded like it never had before.

Here was fate not knocking at the door in the ‘da da da daaaa’ moments but bashing it down big time. Raw and visceral, the orchestral playing was as if all life depended on it. Without using a conductor’s baton, the music is mesmerisingly shaped by Pappano’s hands. Response is instantaneous from the orchestra, whether phrases expanded, held and sweetened or instrumental techniques deployed and heard in full force. Like Shostakovich’s ‘10th Symphony’, this music may be old now in terms of when it was written but this concert proved it can be completely and overwhelmingly contemporary.

London Symphony Orchestra reviewed at Usher Hall; main picture: Andrew Perry.