VALERY GERGIEV’S BRAHMS AND SZYMANOWSKI

An evening of expressive playing by the LSO ends on a triumphant note

The London Symphony Orchestra launched its 2012/13 season at the Barbican with the first of a series of concerts dedicated to Brahms and Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. This mixture of known and less-known music is the brainchild of principal conductor Valery Gergiev.

Szymanowski, who died in 1937, was regarded as an outsider – perhaps because being born in what is today the Ukraine (then Poland) he was outside the European epicentre of Viennese classical music. His Symphony No 1, written in 1906, opened the evening, conducted by Valery Gergiev. It is a work much influenced, certainly at the beginning, by Richard Strauss, although Szymanowski lacks the bravado, confidence and delicacy of Strauss's work. Later the symphony finds its own character and gives us the harmonic intensity of earlier romantic music with lyrical tunes and a finale of explosive turbulence.

By the time he wrote the second piece of the evening – Violin Concerto No 1 (1916) – Szymanowski had left Poland to travel to the Mediterranean and North Africa. The influence of German composers such as Strauss and Reger diminished as he widened his experience of different musical cultures. Consequently his use of the orchestra had grown in confi dence and this concerto expressed it admirably. For much of the time, it was not easy to hear the solo violin. Maybe the orchestra, full of the glowing music, overcame the niceties of accompaniment. Only towards the end did the violin impose itself on both music and orchestra.

Brahms Symphony No 1 in C minor ended the evening triumphantly. First performed in 1876, this is a large-scale work much delayed in composition by Brahms's anxiety that it would be dismissed as inferior when compared to Beethoven, who at that time, bestrode the musical world like a colossus.

Today, we know that he need not have worried. The LSO gave us a titanic performance of one of the great symphonic works. LSO's playing was expressive, at times lyrical, then thunderous.

It culminated in gasps and cheers from the audience, amid endless applause.

The next performance is on 11 October. The Brahms/ Szymanowski series continues in December, and finishes with limited dates in March 2013: the Barbican, Silk Street, London EC2: 020-7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk or: www.lso.co.uk