Admirers of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony are having a good time of it. First, there was Ingo Metzmacher's visceral, in-your-face performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London last May. Now at the Proms we have charismatic Thomas Søndergård and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales offering a more measured, if equally formidable interpretation that took a striking approach to the score's ambiguities.

Premiered in 1957, the symphony ostensibly charts the suppression by tsarist forces of the 1905 revolution and the galvanising effect of this on Russian political consciousness. But Shostakovich hinted that the work was a response to the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, while the Mussorgskian bells at the end hint at the perpetuation of tyranny rather than revolutionary change. Whether that final triumph is real or vacuous depends on the conductor.

Søndergård seemingly sees the piece in terms of how fanaticism breeds from violence: after the horror of massacres and the intensity of formal lamentation, the finale, far from being eruptive, had the steady tread and weight of a juggernaut obliterating everything opposing its path. The BBCNOW played it as though possessed, too.

The first half of the programme – the UK premiere of Colin Matthews's Turning Point and Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto – didn't quite have the same force. Turning Point, first heard in Amsterdam in 2007, links an elaborate scherzo with slowly moving chordal music that gradually comes to dominate the entire work: the ecstatic, richly detailed woodwind and brass writing has overtones of Mahler and Berg.

It was beautifully done. Daniel Hope was the dark-toned soloist in the Prokofiev, less overtly refined than some interpreters in the great central Andante, but dexterous, witty and intense elsewhere.

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