It was Anthony Marwood and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe who brought Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) to the Proms two summers ago; the same persuasive team brought it to the Barbican for the final concert of the Traced Overhead series.

The piece lasts only 20 minutes, but feels disproportionately epic. It inhabits the same musical world as Britten's opera Peter Grimes: the orchestral backing moves from solace to menace by sleight of hand, while the violin writing, to which Marwood brings the perfect balance of muscle and lyricism, has a sinister edge.

In the first movement, winding patterns run through the orchestra in a hopeless downward current that the violin has to strive against. But the real conflict comes in the second. Then, the violin's forceful dialogue with an orchestra lurching slowly from one note of its repeating bassline to the next is almost a concerto in itself.

The other Adès on the programme is new to UK audiences. His Three Studies after Couperin, written last year, add hardly anything notewise to the baroque composer's keyboard miniatures. Yet his quirky, subtly witty reorchestration makes them completely new. In Les Amusemens, bass flute and muted low strings burble through the almost minimalist roulades, blurring them intriguingly; in Les Tours de Passe-passe, skipping accents create a deceptive sense of acceleration.

The concert is bookended by classical symphonies: Haydn's No 70 and Beethoven's No 1, both performed with crisp exuberance by the fabulous COE. Adès's conducting, energetic and slightly messy, seems hardly necessary. But at the end of a series that some thought would be overkill for a young composer, his music seems more vital than ever.