New Babylon was the first of Shostakovich's many film scores. It should have established the enfant terrible of Russian concert halls as an equally distinctive talent in the cinema - and would have done so had its first conductor been half as competent as Vladimir Jurowski, who led this performance by the London Philharmonic of a newly reconstructed version alongside a rare screening of Grigori Kozintsev's and Leonid Trauberg's 1929 picture.

Dramatising the 1871 suppression of the Paris Commune, it had an obvious propaganda message for its first audience, who had only recently lived through their own revolution. But it is the film's satire that makes the greater impact. The angry little top-hatted owner of the New Babylon department store and his debauched, operetta-loving friends are sent up mercilessly; the contrast with the intense gazes of the proletarian heroine and the blue-eyed soldier hero couldn't be greater.

Yet for all Kozintsev's and Trauberg's vision and their strikingly original camerawork, it is Shostakovich's music that makes the film, leavening the most obvious satire with a subtler but still pointed narrative of its own. The mood turns on a sixpence. The depraved party scenes, with Offenbach waltzes and the can-can swerving in and out of earshot, have the kind of frenzied galop that would reemerge in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; the strands of romance and sacrifice are underscored with a complete lack of sentiment.

Nothing Kozintsev and Trauberg could think up looked quite as surreal as the presence here of a sign language interpreter, re-semaphoring musical moods set by Jurowski's own gestures only a few metres away. The orchestra itself sounded snappy but a little scrappy in places. But even on an off night, the LPO is a luxurious cinema band, and New Babylon is a significant piece in the Shostakovich jigsaw puzzle.