With two Hungarian composers on the bill, it seemed a safe bet that Thursday night’s concert from the London Symphony Orchestra would offer a pleasurable immersion in pure Magyar fire and spice. But in music as in culture generally, nothing is ever pure, and the concert’s cultural codes were decidedly mixed, in fascinating ways.

First off was the violin concerto by Miklós Rózsa, a Hungarian who, by a circuitous route involving a brief professional stop-off in J S Bach’s church in Leipzig finally ended up in Hollywood. There he became one of the legendary figures of the golden age of film composing, writing scores for the Thief of Baghdad and Ben-Hur, among almost a hundred others. But, like his famous peers such as Korngold and Max Steiner, he never abandoned concert music. His violin concerto, tossed off in six weeks in 1953, slipped down as easily as a glass of Hungarian Tokaji, and was just as warming.

The soloist Roman Simovic is more familiar to London audiences as the genial leader of the London Symphony Orchestra. On Thursday, he seemed somewhat ill-at-ease to be thrust into the limelight in front of his colleagues, but he certainly deserved their hearty appreciation for his agile way of turning instantly from melting lyricism to stamping rustic vigour.

It brought out the malleable quality of the concerto itself, which at one moment seemed to be “home on the range” somewhere in Idaho (a reminder that Hollywood’s musical image of cowboy country was largely a creation of Mittel-Europeans), the next in some lamp-lit boudoir accompanying a romantic declaration in close-up, the next in a knees-up in a Transylvanian village.

Simovic’s plunging melodies were often echoed by a throbbingly impassioned viola or oboe, an effect eagerly seized on by the orchestra under the baton of Kirill Karabits (who was standing in for an indisposed Simon Rattle). There were some outright steals from the better-known violin concerto of Rózsa’s countryman Béla Bartók, but the music was more ingratiating and soft-edged than that hard-line modernist Bartók would have allowed himself.

Or would he? The other piece in the concert, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra of 1943, has a melody in the fourth movement (stolen from a contemporary operetta) that is actually just as romantic as anything in Rózsa’s concerto. By this late stage in his life, in exile and racked with leukemia, Bartók was more romantic than modernist, and the piece is packed with references to folk melodies he’d collected 30 years earlier (but in Romania, not Hungary – Bartók had no time for narrow nationalism).

At one point, a tipsy village band rubs shoulders with what sounds like a Javanese gamelan. All this was glimpsed in Thursday night’s performance, but only as brief stops in Karabits’s urgent reading of the piece, which was always pushing forward. It was certainly thrilling, especially at the ending, even if this rich mélange of a piece, so steeped in regret and nostalgia, ideally needed a more expansive and generous approach to really shine. IH

This concert was filmed by Marquee TV for future broadcast