John Adams kicked off his latest concert with the BBC Symphony by announcing that he wished to "apologise to Mozart" for "sandwiching" the latter's Third Violin Concerto between "two great chunks" of his own work. The chunks in question were My Father Knew Charles Ives and Naive and Sentimental Music - "the closest I've ever come," added Adams, "to musical autobiography."

Both scores were premiered in the past six years, and their juxtaposition with the concerto exposed similarities between Mozart's methodology and Adams's more recent work. The concerto's adagio consists of a long, wide-ranging melody for the soloist that slowly unfurls over quiet rhythmic figurations, though its contours never quite lead where you expect. The first two movements of Naive and Sentimental Music and the second section of My Father Knew Charles Ives are comparable explorations of the relationship between the deceptive unexpectedness of melody and the insistent force of rhythm.

But the titles of both works are teasingly deceptive. Adams's father never did know Charles Ives, though certain similarities in the backgrounds of both composers allow Adams to present portraits of both his parents' courtship and the musical adventures of his own childhood modelled on Ives's Fourth Symphony. Naive and Sentimental Music, meanwhile, turns towards Europe in an examination of Schiller's aesthetics, which equate naivety with spontaneity, and sentimentality with self-consciousness in the creative process. Both performances were exceptionally fine: Naive and Sentimental Music was particularly tense in its examination of concord and conflict in the relationship between melody and rhythm, quashing my previous qualms that the piece is over-long.

Adams's approach to Mozart's Concerto, in comparison, was a bit foursquare and unyielding, not always catching the requisite sense of ebb and flow. The soloist was the startling young Canadian James Ehnes, whose dark tone and intense yet restrained delivery turned a work often seen as calmly seraphic into something uniquely deep, complex and troubling.