Just across from the Festival Hall, the Hayward has opened a show of photographs by Alexander Rodchenko: images of lantern-jawed proletariat striding through Russia. It is easy to dismiss Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as more of the same - an over-earnest tribute to the indomitable spirit of Leningrad, requiring numbers that would tax the Red Army.

The circumstances of its first performance there, behind enemy lines, add to the heroic myth: only after a desperate scramble for extra players (some were actually parachuted in) could the concert finally go ahead. It must have been one of the most moving, if also oddest, musical occasions of the war.

In truth, the Seventh is a complex, agonised work, and, like almost everything Shostakovich wrote, it is nagged by acute self-doubt. Under Vladimir Jurowski's characteristically confident direction, the London Philharmonic blended brute orchestral force with disarming gentleness. Refusing to parody the first movement's jingling military march, which circles the orchestra before closing in for the kill, Jurowski and his troops offered a glimpse of war's intoxicating excitement as well as its menace and hysteria. They were equally at home in the sombre ruins of the adagio, around which a defiant Bach-like violin melody echoes as if in mourning for the shattered city.

Prefacing this was another tale of survival against the odds: Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, whose right hand was lost to a bullet in 1914. Jean-Yves Thibaudet approached the solo part with suave assurance - though perhaps failed to live up to its profound, occasionally tragic, yearning.