LPO, Jurowski, RFH

Asrael, angel of death, rarely glides up to the concert platform; I've only heard Josef Suk's painful and protracted symphony of the same name once before in the Festival Hall, championed by Rattle. In the past, all Suk's great Czech compatriots, including Ančerl, Kubelik and Neumann, paid their respects. Now Vladimir Jurowski joins the distinguished line for a work he clearly loves. It was no fault of his rainbow-hued interpretation if, in a week where I've sat dry-eyed through the film of A Single Man, another artistic take on bereavement left me intrigued but detached at the end of a spiritually overtaxed evening.

Not that Suk insists too much - as well he might have done in 1905 when, midway through work on his monumental tribute to his recently deceased father-in-law Dvořák, his wife Otilka died too. The symphony changed course: instead of a victorious peroration, three movements of variously paced mourning were now followed by two more. There are remarkable feathery sounds and tense rhythms as Asrael lurks, hovers and swoops, but what makes this symphony especially worth resurrecting is the end. "Do you understand what I had to go through in order to achieve that final C major?" Suk asked a friend years later. Jurowski evidently and very sensitively does; the soft brass chords and flickering inner string light could not have been more hauntingly done.

Earlier, the audience could have done with more guidance from the LPO's typically skimpy programme notes, but the constant fluctuations riveted the attention thanks to Jurowski's masterly control of tension and release. Maybe it's all said differently at half the length in Berg's Violin Concerto, but Suk certainly has his own, remarkably discreet way of facing the horror of final illness, the blankness of loss and the still small voice of hope. All that's missing for the fullest emotional impact is melodic cut of the first order.

Suk's fellow countryman and, amazingly, his senior by 20 years Janáček had that in spades. Oddly the gift is rather squandered in the instant spiritual high of The Eternal Gospel, his revelation of divine love at a time when Europe was deep in the mud of the First World War. Again, the most impressive part of the work is the end: this time a plunge from celestial choral Alleluias to the dark night of Czech poet Vrchliky's mystic Joachim de Fiore. Tenor Adrian Thompson, a last-minute replacement for Michael König, handled it with authority, bringing us back into focus. Earlier, light soprano Sofia Fomina seemed a little too glued to her score to raise eyes and voice heavenward, though orchestra and chorus provided the necessary, if rather hazy, glow.

Perhaps some of the charge in Janáček's exultant fanfares had been undermined by beginning with his Taras Bulba, an end-of-concert work if ever there was one. Maybe not enough rehearsal time had been spent on treacherously exposed string protests and blazes, though Jurowski's lean cut and thrust just about carried it. Janacek in any case takes a typically skewed, intriguing view of Gogol's novel about wild 17th century cossacks and the inevitable destruction of a family. Fanatical Taras loses a son a movement before predicting the glory of the Slavs as he burns. It was this apostrophe that appealed to a composer looking eastwards for Czech emancipation from Hapsburg domination, and the LPO trumpets did not let us down in the final, dizzying cadence.

Cleverly, then, Jurowski's ever thoughtful season planning led us onwards in the Czechfest with which we've been happily inundated over the past month. If on this occasion the idealism was on overdrive - we could have done with a haven of undemanding lyricism like the Korngold Violin Concerto in Bĕlohlávek's Barbican concert the previous evening - the festival feeling is far from over: on Wednesday you can hear two more works inspired by Gogol's wackier side, Shostakovich's uncompleted opera The Gamblers and his suite from The Nose. Yet another programme not to be missed. How long such occasions can last in the present climate I don't know, but again it was reassuring last night to see a sizeable audience of all ages.

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