What impresses about Vladimir Jurowski almost as much as his insouciantly assured conducting technique and the high intelligence of his interpretations is the boldness that he shows in programming the London Philharmonic’s concerts. This isn’t yet the most virtuosic orchestra in London. But true music-lovers are flocking to hear it because Jurowski is devising such intriguing combinations of works, then coaxing his players to perform them so persuasively.

It’s a winning formula, as the opening concert of the LPO’s season showed. What a brilliant idea to slide into The Rite of Spring without pause or applause (Jurowski even kept a beat going, to fool us) after György Ligeti’s 1961 avant-garde classic Atmospheres, so that Stravinsky’s bassoon emerged out of Ligeti’s wispy, endlessly drifting clouds of clusters. It was rather as if one had been taken on a journey through the mists of time to some savage, primordial ceremony.

And what a thrilling rediscovery Jurowski and the LPO made of The Rite when they reached it. The radical speeds, and speed changes; the emphasis on gritty textures; the sudden spotlighting of details that are normally hidden in the splurge: all this made one listen anew to a piece that is sadly often made to sound all too routine.

The programming of the concert’s first half was equally striking. It was counter-intuitive, but inspired, to precede Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new violin concerto with Vaughan Williams’s short but characterful Eighth Symphony, because both English composers look outside the mainstream classical-music tradition for ways of expressing their seething and often dark passions. In Vaughan Williams’s case the chief impetus came from folksong and Tudor polyphony. For Turnage, it is jazz, soul and big bands. Indeed, his new concerto is titled Mambo, Blues and Tarantella.

It is cleverly constructed, fizzingly energetic, full of off-kilter rhythms and loose-limbed percussion, and a truly meaty challenge for a virtuoso violinist with an appetite for spurting out fiendish cascades of notes — almost non-stop in the twitchy Tarantella finale, which conjures the image of someone desperately trying to dance off the feverish effects of a spider-bite. I just wish that it was a bit more memorable.

Turnage’s best pieces are those where he really enters into the populist idioms he loves so much, rather than dutifully trying to reconcile them with the dull harmonic patina of serialism. But the blues here sounded more like the greys. A pity. It was stunningly played by Christian Tetzlaff.

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