Doing America coast to coast and spanning almost a century of music gave an irresistibly wide sweep to this programme by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with Eric Stern as conductor.

Plotted on the map, the trajectory looked straightforward: from Gershwin and Bernstein in New York, across the prairies in Roy Harris’s Third Symphony, to reach the California celebrated by John Adams in The Dharma at Big Sur, his concerto for electric violin. Yet, by pairing Harris’s and Adams’s less familiar works in the first half, it was the distinctiveness of sound and language that came through: the emphatic, stirring melodies in the single-movement work of Harris, a pioneer of the American symphony, complemented the expansiveness of Adams’ evocation of the west coast, in which the Buddha’s universal truth meets the spirit of Jack Kerouac. A decidedly maximal not minimalist experience, the concerto is not typical of this composer’s output. With its six strings giving added range and the mellow depth of a bowed sitar, the electric violin is crucial to the work’s ethos, but so too is Adams’s departure from western instrumental tuning in favour of the more eastern feel of just temperament.

Far from finding it unsettling to be taken out of a comfortable parameter into a whole new aural zone, this audience was transported first by soloist Chloë Hanslip’s impassioned lyricism, and then by its ever-more ecstatic indulgence.

William Wolfram was the pianist in Rhapsody in Blue, juggling the big-boned jazz element with moments of Ravel-like clarity. Stern went on to elicit both exuberance and tenderness in Bernstein’s West Side Story – Symphonic Dances. As balancing acts go, the moment he lost his footing on the podium was more nerve-wracking, but Stern clung on and the final applause for him signalled relief as well as admiration.

• On iPlayer and Radio 3 live from St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 15 April. Box office: 029-2087 8444.