Michael Tilson Thomas’s musical tastes have numerous strands — American, Russian, Central European. But what to choose? Last Thursday and Sunday, the London Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor went the Austro-German route, with Schubert, Mahler and Berg.

Can’t complain about that; though on Sunday, as the half hour of Rosamunde incidental music ticked past, a listener might question whether Schubert was being best served. Sombre glories in the overture, yes, plus a good tune. But it took the Act III entr’acte, with its tender strings, to make Tilson Thomas appear engaged, and the LSO sound special.

Then Matthias Goerne walked on, for Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Hearts quivered, nerves stiffened; for Goerne has been unpredictable recently, with his velvet baritone liable at the drop of a song to fall into an emotional deep freeze. We heard numerous danger signals. There was cloudy diction; a chill crept into the drummer boy’s song; at one point in Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen his musical thought lasted longer than his breath. Yet elsewhere, as his body and hands writhed, the clouds lifted, lines became sweetly floated and breaths sustained, with words memorably shaded by bitter snarls (Revelge) or, at the end, sad defeat.

If Goerne wobbled, Tilson Thomas and the orchestra stayed reasonably solid, colouring the songs’ narratives with hues the singer whispered or missed. The woodwinds’ fish in the St Anthony song needed more of a sardonic gleam. But the reveille trumpetings of Revelge were exemplary, building in brashness until they shrieked.

Full orchestral glory erupted only in the second half. First, Mahler’s Blumline, the innocent pastoral intermezzo originally incorporated into his First Symphony, elegantly and touchingly played. Then came Berg’s Three Pieces for orchestra, that whirling, baleful portrait of a schizophrenic age. The work is now almost 100 years old. Yet it still seemed a dangerous beast as Tilson Thomas and the LSO blared away, glittered and sighed, raised a hammer, and whacked the Austro-German empire to smithereens.

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