Vladimir Jurowski at the Proms

The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, whose family now lives in Berlin, has a track record of promoting music ever so slightly off the beaten track. If you thought you knew Tchaikovsky, then the Manfred Symphony might come as something of a surprise, as may those bits of Stravinsky’s oeuvre that haven’t made the popular cut. His Proms concert last night with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra displayed something of this kind: most know the names of Kurt Weill, Thomas Adès and Sergei Rachmaninoff, but they might not be able to point out the eclectic choice he brought out.

Well, that excludes a large part of Weill’s Little Threepenny Music at least, since it contains the tune of “Mack the Knife”, the opening hit song that Weill composed on the night of the first performance of The Threepenny Opera. Mozart did precisely the same with his overtures to Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, and Weill’s tunes are just as memorable, especially when played with such élan as the selected wind and brass brought to this opening. One of the greatest ironies of art music is that long after his death Weill’s tune of vagabond anti-capitalist alienation became such a handy accompaniment to American McDonalds adverts.

That sense of cynical tunefulness that characterises any playing of Weill’s Weimar-era music was somewhat at odds with the largely boisterous and highly rhythmic focus of Thomas Adès’ Piano Concerto, first written for last night’s Russian-American soloist, Kirill Gerstein. The British composer’s music has been frequently lauded by those who know in the world of classical music, without quite managing to secure a hit with a big audience; his music does, by his own insistence, define classification. A sometimes jazzy, even reflective, piece, the Concerto nevertheless leaves the listener with a good sense of momentum and vivacity, though whether it amounts to more than a good dose of American modernism is hard to determine. Gerstein’s playing, however, was fully in touch with the composer’s intentions, and he gave an assured and varied account.

Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony does suffer to a certain extent on account of not being his Second. It doesn’t have the wonderfully Russian sense of spacious lyricism and utter tunefulness of the earlier work, nor quite the fiery instrumentation and brilliance of the Symphonic Dances which were to come just a few years after the premiere of this, his last symphony, in 1936. The Orchestra did give it every ounce of Romantic lyricism they could find, and the almost jazz-infused harmonies of the first movement were vividly played.

Indeed, vividness seems to sum up the best of Jurowski’s work, with his finely poised and mature conducting clearly at home in the German orchestras he has taken over since leaving the London Philharmonic and Glyndebourne in Britain. He presented here an almost quintessential Proms programme of a postmodern age: a seemingly unrelated series of the old and the new, the boisterous and the reflective, the seat-fillers and the awkward contemporary. Somehow, though, they did seem linked, in the rhythmic punctiliousness of the Adès and the Rachmaninoff, and the studious intensity of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra’s impressive string sound.

The Berliners will be back, but you almost think they would be better suited to the bigger repertoire in the Albert Hall, to the Strauss tone poems and the Berlioz and Mahler symphonies. The big stuff doesn’t all have to be saved for Sir John Eliot Gardiner any more.

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