If I were Dome boss Nick Dodds, I would be employing structural engineers to check the auditorium and the roof for cracks. The Russians have been in town playing Russian music and I swear the force of their music-making moved my seat back several feet.

The MSSO was founded in 1943 and among the performers to influence and enhance its reputation have been David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels and Mstislav Rostropovich.

Since 1989 its chief conductor has been Pavel Kagan, and its players are well-salted with older musicians, disciplined and highly skilled.

What they gave us on Thursday was a truly magical evening of splendid music played with precision, passion and power.

This was premiere league stuff, a world-class orchestra playing at the peak of its powers.

The concert opened with a fairly rare piece by Alexander Glazunov, his Concert Waltz in D Major, dating from 1893.

This is of such a tuneful nature that it threatened to outdo the waltz king himself, Johann Strauss.

The powerfully focussed and emphatic pianist Alexander Kobin, just 26, presented a most mature reading of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, a piece mixing sombre Russian melodies with humour and grotesque fantasies.

But the undoubted highlight was Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and its noisy, exuberant and forceful finale, The Great Gate Of Kiev.

This magnificent and massive chorale of a piece must surely have threatened the Dome's stability. It was a reading that left me speechless with awe.