John Adams's 10-day residency with the London Symphony Orchestra ended with the British premiere of his latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest, for string quartet and orchestra. It was first performed last March in San Francisco, and composed for the St Lawrence Quartet, who were the soloists here. If the title is a tribute to the late writer David Foster Wallace and his most celebrated novel, Infinite Jest, then musically it's a homage to Beethoven.

Adams admits to having been obsessed by Beethoven's string quartets and piano sonatas since he was a teenager, and the material of the 25-minute work is mostly derived from those works. The Scherzos of the C sharp minor Quartet, Op 131, and the F major, Op 135, are heavily exploited; there are more fleeting references to other works too, while the Seventh Symphony looms large in one section. It's all woven together with great ingenuity, but to little consequence: the subtly amplified Quartet works hard but doesn't really set up a meaningful dialogue with the orchestra, while Beethoven's ideas themselves aren't processed into anything strikingly fresh. It's only the fact that the propulsive textures stem from Beethoven in the first place that gives them any identity at all.

Older Americana had preceded Adams's own music. There was Charles Ives's Country Band March, the anarchic collage of marches, songs and hymn tunes that he later recycled in the second of Three Places in New England, and the suite from Copland's Appalachian Spring, which always seems to over-inflate a work that's so perfectly proportioned in its original ensemble version. Elliott Carter's Variations for Orchestra can seem one of his most forbidding scores, but Adams and the LSO gave it a better sense of shape and accumulating drama than any live performance I've previously heard.

• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnReview