The programming of Valery Gergiev’s concert with the LSO last night was bold but also astute. Bold because it included not only the Violin Concerto of Schoenberg (putatively death at the box-office) but also two of the less familiar works of Stravinsky (Symphony in Three Movements) and Rachmaninoff (Symphonic Dances). Astute because these three works were all written in the Thirties and Forties when their respective composers had emigrated to America, thus ensuring both a measure of spiritual affinity and of audience awareness.

Not that the Schoenberg is easy in any sense. For the soloist it poses exorbitant technical demands — though one would hardly have been aware of the fact given Nikolaj Znaider’s facility. It can be difficult for an audience to follow the plot, too, but Znaider and Gergiev had clearly worked hard on it and presented a cogently argued account, threaded through with lyricism, playfulness and soul.

The Stravinsky Symphony revisits the world of pounding, jagged rhythms familiar from the Rite of Spring three decades earlier. This time the violence is not that of atavistic ritual but of wartime military machines (the work was begun in 1942). Gergiev’s powerful reading was certainly not lacking in savagery, though there is also an expressive quality, a charm even, that was not much evident.

In Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Gergiev relished the vein of deep melancholy, capturing the whiff of morbidity in what was to be the composer’s last work.

The concert was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast next Thursday. The Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff can be heard again tonight, this time with the Korngold Violin Concerto.

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