LPO/Jurowski review – discipline, energy and whip-smart direction

Royal Festival Hall, London
In a show of great mutual understanding, Vladimir Jurowski led the London Philharmonic through a thoughtful and refreshing programme of enormous musical contrasts

There are exciting upsides, of which more in a moment, to Vladimir Jurowski’s year of London Philharmonic concerts at the Southbank Centre around the themes of religion and faith. But there are also things that demand caution and even scepticism: in particular the implicit policy at the Southbank Centre, of which this festival is the latest example, that classical music is to be promoted more for the history and ideas that may, or may not, inspire it than for the quality and reward of the music itself.

This issue niggled away through these second and third concerts of the series. In both cases, as is the way with Jurowski, the programming was innovative and rewarding. But the promotion of works by Kancheli, Martinu and Vaughan Williams as essentially elegaic in the first of the two concerts seemed tendentious and not particularly illuminating. Similarly with the works by Rebel, Milhaud and Adams that made up the next concert, where the enormous musical contrasts were the stimulating thing, not the claim that they all challenged an existing order.

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