LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience to consider it within a rather different narrative; in lieu of an arc of Germanic development, moving from Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Jurowski instead framed it with Hungarian works from Bartók and Ligeti. While the dialogue between these three exploratory pieces may have been more oblique, Jurowski’s highly coloured reading of the Mahler remained briskly direct.

Lontano, described by Alex Ross as a “musical shadow play”, torments, seduces and ultimately rejects the listener from behind a gauzy curtain. Growing out of a pianissimo unison for flute and cello, the pinprick focus of Ligeti’s sound drifts and diverges as other instruments crowd in. Each tracing the same melody – taken from the composer’s Lux aeterna – the effect is artfully random, the aleatorics of a composer having too much fun to give over control.

Jurowski’s is a precise technique, and within the framework of his absolute clarity the filmy textures and shifting planes of sound were allowed to go about their tectonics freely. The currency of this kind of orchestral writing has become devalued by film scores (with Ligeti himself adding to the rot), but such textures as are here conjured deserve more than a supporting role: high, ringing harmonics in the violins are set against the copper sheen of muted brass and bass clarinet, a tremolo cello adds pulsing heartbeat to a sustained woodwind chord.

Jurowski and the LPO were joined by Hungarian violinist Barnabas Kelemen for Bartók’s somewhat neglected Violin Concerto No 1. The work of a composer not only young but in (largely unrequited) love, its heady two-movement structure carries nothing like the taut, technical heft of No 2. The charms may be naïve but the architecture is already impressively secure and repays careful listening.

The Andante sostenuto - an extended cantilena with accompaniment – is all about the soloist, who must simultaneously become the flighty Stefi Geyer, and woo through the pleading, hoping Bartók persona. Blessed with enviable technique, Kelemen’s rather externalised approach did little to engage us with the work’s tensions. It became clear both in the second movement and the first encore – the Presto from Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin – that he is most at home in a fist fight against technical foes, vanquishing virtuoso passages of double-stopping and passagework with aplomb. Both this opening movement and the melancholy Sarabande from Bach’s D major Partita (the second encore) revealed a lack of substance below the technical waterline, the understanding, and dare I say sincerity, that anchors the dramatics.

Treating his vocal soloists as extended orchestral textures and fragmenting an extended ballad narrative between these soloists and the choir, Mahler’s Das klagende lied comes as close as the composer was willing to go to the opera he would never write. Eschewing character for a single folk narrative that carries almost parable-like weight, we must follow the tale of brutal fratricide for a woman as it bounces from speaker to speaker, from vast onstage orchestra (six harps!) to offstage band.

Performing the work once again in its original extended version, Jurowski clearly understands the colourful Wagner-inflected score with its motivic cells and vivid musical description. While his decision to place his soloists along the raised back gallery makes complete sense in theory, playing into his textural reading, in practice these crucial roles were all but lost, crushed underfoot by the weighty orchestra. While soprano Melanie Diener was the worst casualty, and neither Christopher Purves nor Michael König had much chance to prove anything, Christianne Stotijn (pictured right) projected far better than I might have hoped, swelling through Mahler’s lines and providing really the only attempt at characterisation. The Philharmonic Choir (supplemented by soloists from the Glyndebourne chorus) were also on strong form, with tenors and basses especially summoning some deep colours to match the tubas and low woodwind.

Pacing was brisk throughout, driving this rather unwieldy epic through to its inevitable conclusion. Moments of pause – the curious little Viennese ballroom episodes of Der spielmann, the big reveal for the boy treble in Hochzeitsstück – might have helped characterise this journey differently, but the goal-driven approach certainly made for a sudden and emphatic death-chord ending.

An interesting programme this: a portrait of three artists under construction, glancing both back to their origins and forward to their mature selves. With Jurowski and the LPO you are always guaranteed intelligence, and this evening was no exception.

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