With this appearance at the proms, and two concerts at the Barbican in a fortnight’s time with the orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera, Vladimir Jurowski is giving London audiences another reminder of what they have been missing since he stepped down as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic two years ago. He has been in charge of the Berlin Radio Symphony (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin) since 2017, and although in the pecking order of the German capital’s orchestras it would probably rank behind the Berlin Philharmonic and the Staatskapelle, on the evidence of this concert it is a very fine band indeed.
Jurowski began with a suite from a work that had received its first performance exactly 95 years earlier. Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenmusik (“Little Threepenny Music”) is a suite of eight movements that Weill extracted from his score for Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, using the same raw-edged wind-based pit band as the original “play with music”. With the help of some suitably louche solo playing from the trumpet, trombone and saxophone particularly, Jurowski conjured the brittle, sardonic world of Berlin in the days of the Weimar Republic with cool precision. His handling of the tumbling, teeming textures that surround the solo lines in Thomas Adès’s Piano Concerto was equally attentive, though, as so often, radio listeners will have got a better appreciation of the work’s intricate detailing than we had in the hall itself.
