London Symphony Orchestra/Rostropovich, Barbican, London

"Those songs were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky." The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, on the revolutionary songs which make up the thematic fabric of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, "The Year 1905". There is a lot of history riding on those songs, that symphony, this extraordinary concert. And history, as we know, makes for the richest subtext.

To have Mstislav Rostropovich, the dedicatee of the First Cello Concerto, supporting, urging, nursing his young compatriot Denis Shapovalov through the rigours of the piece he himself brought into the world was a little like having the composer present. Shapovalov tapped into that and managed to his own short history to bear, too.

The nervous energy, the impatience of the "now" generation lent its own urgency. He pressed the opening allegretto hard. The repetitions were properly obsessive. The exchanges with solo wind voices were especially telling: the solo horn of Timothy Jones, of course, but also Andrew Marriner's solo clarinet, whose Klezmer band character Shapovalov seemed almost to mimic. The slow movement's touching cantilena seemed more than ever something from a forgotten past – even before its transmutation into ghostly harmonics. As for the cadenza, Shapovalov went for it like a gran scena for a mad cantor.

Shostakovich's deep affinity with Jewish folksong, real or imagined, stemmed from its bitter irony. But there is little evidence of irony in the nine revolutionary songs that inhabit the 11th Symphony. They stand as a symbol of Russian fortitude, of the will of the people to break free of the cycle of misery that blights them even now. The date on the title page of the score may be "1905" – the year of the failed October Revolution – but at the time of writing the piece, Shostakovich had seen one form of repression supplanted by another, and then another. Small wonder that, when he came to write of Lenin and the 1917 Revolution (in his 12th Symphony), he had no stomach for it. The 11th, though, is a powerful piece of social history and, in the development and accumulative impact of its themes can be overwhelming, and was so here.

Rostropovich unfolds the piece as if in real time. Even where there is little or no music on the page, as in the opening evocation of the "Palace Square", the weight of his experience brings its own atmospheric potency. There are idiosyncrasies: phrases highlighted, underlined, pulled into unnatural focus because they mean so much to him. But these quirks must be of equal significance to an audience if they are to bring it to its feet, as happened on this occasion.

The London Symphony Orchestra was sensationally good. Concentration, attack, heart. Who could easily forget the dramatic fugal build up to the "Bloody Sunday" massacre, trombones curdling the harmony with their leering chromatics? Or, at the opposite extreme, the other-worldly sound from muted violas framing the third movement's "requiem for the proletariat"? Or the single voice – that of the cor anglais (wonderfully played by Christine Pendrill)?

But as the bells clang out their ambiguous message at the close, Rostropovich has them ring on and on, like the biggest question mark in history.