We’re still in the foothills of the Southbank Centre’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, but already the harmonic ground is becoming unsteady underfoot. Last weekend saw the gemütlichkeit of Johann Strauss give way to the brutality of Richard Strauss, exposed us to the moistly chromatic flesh of Salome that lies behind the seven veils, and showed just a hint of Schoenbergian ankle. So surely this weekend’s return to 1900 and Elgar’s choral-society-stalwart The Dream of Gerontius is something of a retreat?

With the cuts still to bite deep, it's enterprising business as usual for both of London’s biggest concert-hall complexes and their satellite orchestras in the newly announced season to come. I use the word "complex" carefully, because as from September, the Barbican Centre, which already has access to LSO St Luke's up the road, will also be using the 608-seater hall constructed as part of its neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court development.

This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20^th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.

Why so much of Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO on theartsdesk, you may ask, when other concerts pass unremarked? The answer is simple: quite apart from the immaculate preparation and the most elegant conducting style in the business, Jurowski programmes with an imagination matched by none of London’s other principal conductors – unless you like lots of Szymanowski served up by Gergiev with lumpy Brahms – and, more important, always finds connections.

Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)

Mozart and Wagner were the opposite compass points of Richard Strauss’s classical-romantic adventuring, and Amadeus has often made an airy companion to the rangy orchestral tone poems in the concert hall. By choosing Haydn instead as the clean limbed first-halfer in two London Philharmonic programmes, Yannick Nézet-Séguin came armed with period instrument experience of the master’s symphonies in his dazzling debut concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. That's quite a mouthful. Bruckner's symphonies can be too. But this is one of the reasons why Skrowaczewski has acquired quite a cult following for his Bruckner performances; it's why I once drove all the way to Zurich to hear him conduct one. His Bruckner is never offered as an indigestible slab of meat. It's never hard or chewy.

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier András Schiff (ECM)

Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony.

What, another review of an LPO/Jurowski concert in less than a week? Reasoning the need, it only has to be said that other orchestras may kick off their seasons by mixing the unfamiliar with core repertoire, but none would dare launch with not one but two programmes featuring this only-connect kind of singularity (and more to come in the “War and Peace” series next week).