The partnership between John Adams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra may not bring the ensemble its most revelatory conducting, but it does produce some of its most interesting programmes.

This one started with Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale, a brief ballet score reworking his opera The Nightingale with even stronger nods to the rhythmic drive of Petrushka. The music depicting the mechanical glitter of the emperor's court came over best, which is perhaps not surprising as this hard-edged, glinting style characterises much of Adams's own music.

What was arguably the evening's highlight came next: Bartok's long-undiscovered Concerto No 1, played by the young Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto. He used jarringly uneven vibrato, inconsistent tone and brash open strings, or played with the harsh sound of a fiddler, or bent the tuning - and he was absolutely mesmerising.

The first movement is one of Bartok's most unabashedly lyrical pieces, written when he was in the grip of an all-consuming and still-hopeful passion. Kuusisto began alone, as if he were hearing the music in his head. His playing rarely conformed to conventional notions of desirable sound, which conversely made this arching movement seem even more beautiful, and the spiky second movement more vivid.

How to follow such an intense, gripping performance? Adams chose to calm the mood briefly with Ives's From Greenland's Icy Mountains, the quirky but reverent fugue that forms the third movement of his Fourth Symphony. With his own choral work Harmonium, however, the intensity was pumped up again.

The BBC Symphony Chorus was excellent in some demanding writing: the choir are often used like instru ments, throbbing along with repeated syllables. This 1981 score is beginning to sound a little dated, and the treatment given in the first two movements to poetry by Donne and Dickinson was laboured. But the ecstatic drive of the third was exhilarating.