LPO/Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall, London, Review Now in his sixth season as the LPO's principal conductor, Vladimir Jurowski has established himself as a conductor of high seriousness, keen on darker forms of contemporary music. We've become used to his elegant, electric figure on the podium, his stabbing down-beats and general air of exacerbated fierceness. Even so, this concert of politically charged music was startlingly intense. As Jurowski told us from the podium it was dedicated to all those who have suffered oppression, and was conceived as a spiritual journey or dialectical confrontation. On one side, Beethoven's Enlightenment optimism, represented by his Fidelio overture and Fifth Symphony. On the other, pieces portraying the horrors of the 20th century: the ghastly suffering of the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, and the torture and execution of a Czech anti-Nazi journalist. We began in bright light for the Fidelio overture, despatched with appropriately bright, clean lines by the LPO. With Schoenberg's setting of Byron's great excoriation of tyranny, the Ode to Napoleon, the scene started to darken. The solo part is pitched in Schoenberg's characteristic tone of half-speaking, half-singing. It's a tone that can all too easily sound stiff and affected, but not as enunciated by bass Robert Haywood. Even so, the intricacy of Byron's argument was somewhat overwhelmed by Schoenberg's powerfully expressionist score, though this subtle performance from the LPO could hardly be blamed for that. A Survivor from Warsaw, Schoenberg's other great "war" piece, fared better; in fact it was overwhelmingly powerful. Presented with a text that recounted human suffering rather than a tract, Haywood's powers shone more clearly. Then came the journey's nadir, with Luigi Nono's setting of diaries and letters by Czech journalist Julius Fucik. Here the modest stage direction by Annabel Arden, hinted at earlier, became more overt. The hall was plunged into darkness, the figure of Fucik (impersonated with tremendous force by Omar Ibrahim) was picked out by a torch, as if under interrogation. Images, of some dank interrogation chamber, floated on the screen above. As Fucik's resolve hardened, so Nono's music assembled itself from tentative single notes into a massive percussion-soaked affirmation. At the end, after Fucik's final letter invoking Beethoven's joy, there was a blaze of lights, and that indomitable phrase that begins Beethoven's Fifth rang out. We were left blinking like the prisoners in Fidelio, faced with a change of state too big to comprehend.