White hot intensity in Jurowski’s Lyatoshynsky with the LPO

In November, as part of its “Moments Remembered” series, the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s powerful Thirteenth Symphony. It sets poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, including the haunting Babi Yar, commemorating the 1941 massacre of Jews by the Nazis at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv. This evening’s concert, under Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski, dovetailed with it neatly, closing with Boris Lyatoshynsky’s Third Symphony, a Ukrainian composer’s response to those same atrocities.

Lyatoshynsky wrote his Symphony no. 3 in B minor between 1948-51. Although it was officially dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution, its atmosphere is laced with ominous menace and savage violence. The LPO ripped into the first movement’s turbulent Allegro impetuoso section with white hot intensity. Hints of folksong are heard, particularly in the balmy opening to the second movement, but percussion and brass pile in with a militaristic assault, followed by a ferocious Scherzo.

The finale was originally given the epithet “Peace shall defeat War”, drawing on the idea that enlightenment could be drawn from the threads of the previous movements. It did not go down well with the Soviet apparatchiks, who dismissed Lyatoshynsky as a “bourgeois pacifist”. Like Shostakovich, though, Lyatoshynsky could play the political system and duly revised his finale so that his symphony could still be played. Here, Jurowski conducted the original version of that finale – as did Kirill Karabits two years ago at the Barbican – ending in pealing bells and shimmering tam-tam for an epic climax.

Jurowski has the most expressive left hand in the business, not just controlling dynamics and cueing, but turning the screw, ratcheting up the emotion or – crucially – staving off audience interruption between movements. This helped the first item in the concert cohere, a suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s opera Semyon Kotko.

Prokofiev was adept at salvaging music from his operas: The Fiery Angel found its way into his Third Symphony; Summer Night uses music from Betrothal in a Monastery. Semyon Kotko, the composer’s first “Soviet” opera (1940), is set in Ukraine (where Prokofiev was born) at the end of the First World War, the German defeat leading to civil war with Semyon, a Russian soldier in love with the daughter of a wealthy peasant, caught in the middle. The Nazi-Soviet pact meant the opera was swiftly dropped from the repertoire, but Prokofiev extracted a suite of eight movements. The music is instantly recognisable as Prokofiev, the big sweeping melody of The Southern Night sounding like it could have stepped straight out of Cinderella. Six items from the suite were performed here, Jurowski dropping the Ours Have Come finale, depicting the triumphal Red Army, ending instead with the mournful Funeral.

In between Prokofiev and Lyatoshynsky on this dark programme, more gloom in the shape of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, heard, unusually, in Edison Denisov’s orchestrations. Matthew Rose’s black bass embodied death in its various guises with power and aplomb, but there was velvet softness in the opening Lullaby, the Mother rocking her feverish child as Death lulls it to a permanent sleep. Rose sang with a sardonic snarl in the Trepak and was suitably implacable in The Field Marshal as Death tramples the battlefield, Jurowski unleashing the full might of the orchestra.

There were fine programme notes, but having the Russian song texts in the original Cyrillic rather than in a transliteration would hardly have been helpful to the majority of the audience; a minor gripe in an absorbing evening.