There is music that can speak for itself, and there is music that needs (or benefits from) an explicator. Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 (1957), the major offering on this week's Minnesota Orchestra program, is firmly in the latter camp. Subtitled "The Year 1905," the piece is avowedly programmatic. With graphic realism, Shostakovich narrates a prerevolutionary massacre of some 1,200 peaceful petitioners by the czar's Cossacks before St. Petersburg's Winter Palace on Jan. 9, 1905, weaving a variety of carefully chosen protest and prison songs into his musical fabric.

And there's the rub. Soviet audiences of 50 years ago knew these songs and, most important, their unvoiced texts -- politically ambiguous, potentially subversive texts that, according to legend, prompted the composer's son to ask, sotto voce, "Papa, will they hang you for this?" Take away this stratum of meaning and you're left with a long, loud, sometimes lurid hour.

Enter conductor Andrew Litton, who in a 12-minute spoken preface to the symphony (with brief illustrations provided by the orchestra) covered a great deal of ground, adroitly engineering a space for the work's reception. Wisely, Litton focused on Shostakovich's musical materials and avoided larger, interpretative hypotheses -- though the conductor's claim that such hypotheses are "all conjecture" felt a bit facile. Thursday's audience rewarded him with uncommonly close attention.

If finally less searing than recordings of the symphony by such echt-Russian conductors as Evgeny Mravinsky and Kiril Kondrashin, Litton and orchestra gave a performance of disciplined ferocity. The ominous desolation of the first movement was superbly controlled; the massive sonorities of the second movement were crushing in their impact. And while the final movement, graced by Marni Hougham's mournful English horn solo, seemed a test of stamina, the kitschy lighting at the work's end -- an unexpected, Leopold Stokowski moment -- hardly made amends.

Franz Liszt's single-movement Piano Concerto No. 2, though not lacking in bravura passages, is no vehicle for a domineering virtuoso; the composer often asks the pianist to accompany the orchestra's winds and strings. Soloist William Wolfram, currently recording Liszt's piano music for the Naxos label, brought exceptional fluidity and limpidity of tone to his account of the concerto; his duet with principal cello Anthony Ross was especially memorable. Wolfram, once a frequent visitor, returned to the orchestra Thursday after a four-year absence; he ought not to stay away so long.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.