This year's Shostakovich celebrations are tending to focus, not unreasonably, on the great tragic symphonies and the soul-searching quartets. So this London Philharmonic programme under Vladimir Jurowski shifting the balance towards Shostakovich the humorist was welcome, especially as it paired him with that other big birthday boy, Mozart, whose propensity for wit is more regularly encountered.

Jurowski himself is something of a comedian on the podium, though his vivid and often idiosyncratic gestures are clearly intended for the benefit of his players, not the audience. But he cued in with impeccable timing every sly sarcasm in Shostakovich's Jazz Suite No.1, demonstrating that its Weill-like parodies are not merely a wicked critique of popular dance music but also a kind of tribute to it. In the manic mayhem of Hypothetically Murdered, a suite salvaged by Gerard McBurney from Shostakovich's extant sketches for a lost score to a surreal circus revue, the LPO were on their most precise and dynamic form, following Jurowski's Chaplin-meets-Buster-Keaton lead through a series of raucous routines and on to an uproarious conclusion.

Also immaculately acted were the contributions by the young Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov, whose readings of the Ten Songs of the Fool from King Lear (which begin, bizarrely, with Shostakovich's version of Jingle Bells), as well as a group of arias from Mozart comedies, revealed a voice of colour and substance and a performer of riveting personality.

The one work on the programme that didn't quite make the grade was Mozart's Musical Joke. No one knows exactly why he wrote this piece ridiculing the efforts of his less gifted colleagues, with its platitudinous commonplaces, non-sequiturs and sheer wrong notes. But its in-jokes were probably designed to appeal to his musical cronies on some convivial carouse, and it didn't quite justify its length on this occasion, however snappily Jurowski delivered the gags.