Classical showmen display their serious side

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Barbican

The Los Angeles Philharmonic makes a sound that is big, and magnificently extrovert. It has a reputation for showmanship, but on this whirlwind three-day residency the orchestra and its music director Gustavo Dudamel seem determined to show its social conscience. Last night’s concert had a Seventies piece about the brutalities of the American penal system, and a piece by Julius Eastman, the neglected black pioneer of minimal music. Today Dudamel launches a “youth manifesto” with an orchestra of players from the UK and LA, and rounds off tonight with Beethoven’s Ninth.

So on paper it’s indubitably serious. But it was hard to know how seriously to take Pollux, the European premiere of which opened Wednesday’s concert. In the programme note its composer Esa-pekka Salonen (the LA Philharmonic’s one-time music director) explained how it was inspired by the Greek myth of the twins Castor and Pollux and how the big chorale at the centre was inspired by the Austrogerman poet Rilke. But it couldn’t hide the fact the piece was emotionally light, and almost embarrassingly beautiful in a peculiarly old-fashioned way.

It was a shock – but a pleasant one – to be whirled from all that sugary beauty into the hard-edged strident world of Amériques, by Edgard Varèse. The orchestra and Dudamel made us keenly aware of the music’s subtle, many-layered complexities, as well as its apocalyptic fury.

Finally came Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, a piece whose tragic grandeur repels anything like showmanship. Dudamel, clearly aware of this, shaped a terrific performance of deep pensive inwardness. In all, the concert gave a taste of the high-seriousness, streetwise edginess and high-octane glitz that makes the LA Philharmonic so prized.

Until tonight. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk