Christoph von Dohnanyi's first full-length Philharmonia concert after the Festival Hall's refurbishment opened with Thomas Adès's Asyla; an unusual choice for Dohnanyi, perhaps, though a striking one. Written for Simon Rattle and the CBSO 10 years ago, it was one of the works that put Adès, then in his mid-20s, on the musical map. The title - the Latin plural of "asylum" - denotes places of both refuge and confinement: the latter also carries overtones of mental illness. The score negotiates the fine line between calm and disturbance, tipping beauty into unease by the deployment of subtle shifts in colour and harmony.

Its appeal for Dohnanyi, as for many of us, lies in its combination of profundity and accessibility, though he is seemingly also at pains to emphasise Adès's debt to early 20th century modernism, a period that Dohnanyi also favours, and which frequently finds him at his best. One was conscious here - more so than with some other interpretations - of the influence of Berg, in the arching theme that opens the work, and of Bartok, in the gurgling discords that kick off the final section. There was a sumptuous finesse to the whole, and playing of daring virtuosity, above all in the fiendish third section, which still startles after repeated hearings.

The rest of the concert, however, was curiously uninvolving. Alfred Brendel was the soloist in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, a performance that found him unaccountably detached in the outer movements, though the central largo, sombrely introverted, was beautifully done. Brahms's Second Symphony came after the interval, unsentimental and craggily forthright, as is Dohnanyi's way with Brahms, though at the same time overly reined-in and, particularly in the first movement, a fraction too cool.