American composer Elliott Carter is one of the miracles of modern music.

At the end of Nicolas Hodges' astonishing performance of his Piano Concerto, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen, the 97-year-old walked on to the Barbican stage to experience that rarest of reactions, a standing ovation for a living composer. It was just reward for a revelatory opening concert in the BBCSO's Get Carter weekend.

The Piano Concerto dates from the early 1960s, and shows Carter at his most uncompromising. At the time, the piece was thought to be almost unplayable, with its multi-layered textures and inscrutable harmonic language. But the brilliance of Hodges' and Knussen's interpretation was the way they dramatised the piece. From the start, this was a no-holds-barred battle between the violence of the piano part and the volcanic energy of the orchestral music. This warfare was mediated by a separate group of seven players who surrounded the piano, shielding Hodges from the barrage of assaults which the brass and woodwind sections unleashed upon him.

After a tense stand-off at the end of the first movement, things became even darker in the second. Hodges' piano lines were slowly smothered by a creepy texture which seeped out from the string section: a dense fug of chromaticism that enveloped and at last asphyxiated the piano part. In the work's final moments, Hodges launched a final, furious attack on his tormentors, only to be reduced to an exhausted gasp at the very end of the piece.

For all his avant-garde rigour, Carter's music is definitively American, and in Knussen's performance of the exuberant Three Occasions, there was music of glinting , luminous brilliance, like sunlight playing on the glass and steel of New York's skyscrapers. It is a subtle, modernist poetry which whets the appetite for the rest of the weekend.

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