A new era — or a “whole new chapter”, as the PR blurb puts it with not entirely persuasive bravado — was proclaimed by the London Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday night, and it’s going to be a noisy one. Valery Gergiev gave his first concert as the band’s new principal conductor, and to mark the event, Barbican patrons were greeted by two huge screens flanking the stage, with photographs of Gergiev’s gnarled, unshaven face and untidy hair beaming at us. The Great Leader has arrived.

Later, between the three items of the first half of the all-Russian programme — Stravinsky and Prokofiev are two of the featured composers in Gergiev’s seven remaining LSO concerts this season, to be joined by Debussy at the next one on March 29 — we were treated to a gallery of LSO players with captioned quotes, all of them saying how wonderful it was to work with “Valery” (well, they would, wouldn’t they?), and, presumably to reassure us all that Gergiev had actually turned up for a rehearsal, we were given the pictorial evidence, with the date of the day before the concert emblazoned on it. The LSO is clearly sensitive about Gergiev’s notoriety as a conductor who turns up at the last minute, leaving deputies to do the preparatory work.

The orchestra must have been nervous, as Gergiev had cancelled his first LSO concert this year just over a week earlier at the Barbican/BBC Sofia Gubaidulina mini-fest — he was “genuinely ill”, we were told — but on Tuesday night he bounded onto the podium with characteristic energy and launched into what was to prove a concert of two halves.

It takes a man of undoubted charisma to sell out a programme on which the main work is Stravinsky’s complete Firebird score, and with a first half comprising (relative) rarities by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The former’s brief, strange little cantata Zvezdoliki (King of the Stars), and Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1923-24) sandwiched a rare outing for Prokofiev’s rebarbative Scythian Suite of four movements from the ballet Ala and Lolly, commissioned and rejected by Diaghilev in 1915. The suite was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, in St Petersburg, so it was an appropriate calling card for Gergiev, whose full-time job is as artistic director of Russia’s second most important opera house.

Certainly, in the little but largely orchestrated cantata, the men of the LSO Chorus were on their mettle for the new principal conductor, spitting out Konstantin Balmont’s text with impressive clarity and doing their utmost to show Gergiev that they can sing the Russian repertoire with as much fervour as a native choir.

Respite from the pounding rhythms and explosive orchestration of the Scythian Suite comes only in the beguiling third movement, Night, in which twinkling celeste starbursts illumine a euphonious trio of flutes, exquisitely played by the LSO’s elite soloists. There was more ear-battering, in the Stravinsky Concerto, from Gergiev’s favourite pianist, the Georgian Alexander Toradze, who attacked the ivories in the allegros of the outer movements as if determined to penetrate the dense textures Gergiev conjured from the LSO winds.

After the interval, the LSO was on more familiar ground, and Gergiev summoned a ravishing palette of sound and breathtaking virtuosity in the ever-astonishing Firebird score. This was Stravinsky’s breakthrough work, in 1910: he had not thrown off the legacy of Tchaikovsky, Wagner and, above all, his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, but was already pointing towards the tumultuous orchestral cataclysm of The Rite of Spring.

Gergiev’s Firebird favours extremes of dynamics, from barely audible pianissimos in the magical opening bars to as-loud-as-possible fortissimos in Kaschey’s Infernal Dance and the closing crescendo. He clearly identifies with the Rimskyesque orientalisms of the music: the slinky Princesses’ Round Dance and the Firebird’s Lullaby have an almost Arabian Nights sensuality in Gergiev’s hands. The BBC will broadcast its recording of the concert on March 29, which seems a long time for Radio 3 listeners to have to wait. Prepare for a rollercoaster ride.

Although the Festival Hall is closed until June this year, the Barbican is by no means the only concert show in town. Just round the corner from the Royal Court theatre, on Sloane Square, Cadogan Hall, the administrative and rehearsal base of the Royal Philharmonic, is attracting sellout crowds, especially for baroque music. With half as many seats again as the 600-capacity St John’s Smith Square, and a more congenial ambience than Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Cadogan is ideal for chamber orchestras and the larger formations of period instrument bands.

Just over a week ago, Robert King’s Kings Consort re-enacted the coronation of George II, or at least its putative musical sequence, to a long sold-out auditorium — it helped, perhaps, that King’s recording has already become a bestseller for Hyperion.

The ceremony at Westminster on October 4, 1727, was the occasion for which Handel wrote his four “coronation anthems”, among which Zadok the Priest has joined the handful of his works that can claim genuine popularity for their thrilling choral outburst after a gently lulling, arpeggiated orchestral prelude. It is usually regarded as the first of the four anthems, but King placed it just before the interval, giving a rousing “curtain” to an event that had more than a whiff of the theatre to it.

Handel’s richly orchestrated scores are like dazzling jewels in the context of music probably used at the coronation by his Tudor and Stuart predecessors, Thomas Tallis, John Farmer, Orlando Gibbons and Henry Purcell, and they shone out brilliantly here. Not quite the Abbey — and Robert instead of George — but a rousing occasion nonetheless.

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