An often highly political argument still raged in the 1960s about Rachmaninov’s proper place in music. Nowadays his work is widely accepted and admired, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s season-long survey of his orchestral works is a fine opportunity to hear important rarities, as well as the chocolate-box concerto favourites. With Vladimir Jurowski as his champion through much of the series, Rachmaninov is unlikely to be more authentically served for some time.

For this opener, Jurowski paired the tone poem The Isle of the Dead, written in Russia in 1909, with Rachmaninov’s last orchestral work, the three-movement Symphonic Dances, completed in the US in 1940. The two pieces have good claims to be the composer’s two most hauntingly original orchestral achievements, and their contrasting textures belie any suggestion that his style never really progressed.

Hearing them side by side brought home the relative spareness and unsettled qualities of Rachmaninov’s later orchestral style. Jurowski drove the earlier piece forward, the pulse never slackening, at times drawing exceptional intensity from the LPO. The Symphonic Dances were even more compelling, with Jurowksi elegantly and deftly emphasising the quicksilver episodic nature of the elegiac orchestral writing, while James Burke’s atmospheric clarinet spearheaded some superb contributions from a uniformly excellent set of LPO wind principals.

Between the two purely orchestral works, Alexander Ghindin was the steely fingered soloist in the original 1891 version of the first piano concerto, which is more often played in the composer’s 1917 revision. From the pyrotechnic opening to the sinuous little andante second movement, Ghindin played with a self-contained idiomatic discipline that worked exceptionally well in a sprawling work in which the debt to Tchaikovsky is never far away.