Of all the Mahler cycles that have proliferated for this and last year's anniversaries, the London Philharmonic's has been, by a long way, the most intelligent and revealing. Rather than a dutiful progress through the symphonies, the LPO series has placed Mahler's achievement in a much broader context, with revivals of his arrangements and reorchestrations of other composers, and by showing how his music influenced subsequent generations.

Vladimir Jurowski's latest contribution didn't contain a single note by Mahler, yet revealed his imprint on everything in it. Arrangements framed the evening; later music formed its core. Janine Jansen was the impressively controlled soloist in Shostakovich's dark, unsmiling Second Violin Concerto, with Jurowski marshalling the orchestra around her with fierce precision. It's not the most overtly Mahlerian of Shostakovich's works, but its vicious moments of sarcasm and brittleness are unthinkable without his example, while in the string-orchestra version that Webern made of his own Five Movements for string quartet Op 5, the late-Romantic world Mahler inhabited is pushed to the edge of collapse.

Jurowski showed great care in the grading and sifting of Webern's textures, and then took equal pains with Mahler's string-orchestra expansion of Beethoven's F minor String Quartet Op 95, even though his rather conservative tempi, presumably chosen to tighten up the rhythmic articulation, meant that the tingling hyperactivity that is such a feature of the original work was rather subdued. The real novelty opened the concert: a suite from the orchestral works of JS Bach concocted for Mahler's opening New York season in 1909. It elides movements from Bach's second and third orchestral suites, preserving the original scoring except for the addition of a piano continuo intended to simulate a harpsichord, and was played here on a honky-tonk upright.

Andrew Clements

Broadcast on Radio 3 on 25 April.