Like many of Michael Finnissy's works, all three of the small ensemble pieces heard in the Philharmonia's early-evening Music of Today concert under the light, but secure, baton of Diego Masson take other music as their starting points.

I'm On My Way overlays the closing number of Porgy and Bess with the kind of gestures Gershwin might have used had he carried out his intention of studying with Berg, Ravel or Glazunov. Underpinned by a regular drum tattoo, the result has something of the feel of memorials like the jazz marches once played before New Orleans funerals. But it attains a distinctive quality of its own, far above the level of parody.

So does the use of a 19th-century American hymn tune in Judgement in That Day, which suggests Charles Ives in its dismantling and reassembling of elements that somehow retain the simplicity and sturdiness of the original.

The more substantial Catana evolves from a Romanian folk dance and links its raw national accent to the modernism that has always been the other main strand of Finnissy's compositional identity. Vivid and, at times, disturbing in its musical discourse, it set the seal on a programme that highlighted the imagination of his unique language.

The Philharmonia's main evening event brought together three popular masterpieces under Charles Mackerras. His certainty of approach made each tempo and every phrase sound natural and inevitable in Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. In the middle, Viktoria Mullova was the slender-toned soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto. She plumbed its surface rather than looking deeper, maintaining a distanced reserve from its warmth and immediacy.