At long last, professional orchestras are back in York. This month the BBC Philharmonic, next month the Hallé.

Not before time: the Barbican has been more or less dark for so long, we’ve almost forgotten what it was like. But the BBC Phil reminded us on Saturday – and how.

Not for nothing has Vassily Sinaisky been chief guest conductor of the BBC Philharmonic for 15 years. Eschewing a baton, he moulds his players without babying them. In a programme of Elgar, Haydn and Tchaikovsky, they played as if the music was fresh on the page, with total commitment. There is little to match a Russian conductor in Tchaikovsky, here his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique.

The opening movement’s second theme entered magically. But it was deceptive: after the near-silence at its end, it was developed with terrifying attack. So too, the big cello tune in the second movement, though graceful, was utterly unsentimental.

Sinaisky whipped up tremendous excitement in the scherzo’s march, the strings really digging deep. But he fooled us again in the final lament, building up a huge, prolonged crescendo to the central crash.

There was brief consolation in the low brass quartet. But we were not to be let off the hook in the closing bars. This was tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

He had taken a similarly muscular approach to Elgar’s Introduction And Allegro. The composer’s “devil of a fugue” can never have been more sinewy, not to say feisty. The surprise in Alison Balsom’s account of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto was not so much her taut trills or even her subtle shadings: it was the poetic melancholy she found in the slow movement.

All of a piece, indeed, with the Tchaikovsky to come. A memorable evening, from every angle.