It’s a peculiar and alienating feeling to sit among a crowd of people and feel as defensive as the others feel delighted, as unmoved as they feel enthusiastic. That’s what happened to me on October 22, when Vladimir Jurowski, the conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and new music director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, gave a concert of works by Brett Dean (“Testament” for orchestra), Schoenberg (the Piano Concerto, with Marc-André Hamelin), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, in a “retouched” version by Gustav Mahler. At the performance, in Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Jurowski responded to a bad review in his introductory remarks, then proceeded to give a performance full of the problems from which he had just defended himself.
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