Music has been described as an amoral art because it often plunges into an irrational territory beyond good and evil. Ingo Metzmacher's latest concert with the London Philharmonic, however, reminded us that many of the greatest composers have also used music to explore the political horrors of their times, creating works that resonate into our own present.

Metzmacher chose works that dealt with war, its immorality, its aftermath and the fact that its indignities are a betrayal of humanity's highest aspirations. Thomas Adès's... but all shall be well, written in 1994 as a companion piece to Britten's War Requiem, was followed by a group of songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which deal with the cruelty of imperialistic militarism and the gradual sullying of human spirituality. After the interval came Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, with its suggestions of mechanised conflict, its outpourings of communal grief and its bitter awareness that mankind is still the greatest force for mass destruction on our planet.

These were performances of tremendous force and insight, played with a combination of perfect clarity and visceral emotion. The impact of Mahler's songs was occasionally weakened by the soloist, baritone Matthias Goerne, whose voice has lost some of its fullness and whose expressionistic delivery, once so effective, now seems mannered. The performance's power lay in the orchestra. Distant fanfares hinted at impending conflict, a leaden march dragged a deserter off to execution and brass chorales suggested tenuous consolation.

Adès's tintinnabulatory vision of paradise, meanwhile, offered a fragile glimpse of unearthly comfort, while Metzmacher's performance of Shostakovich's Eighth could only be described as flattening, its brutality and sorrow tearing you in two, before finally collapsing in numbed exhaustion. Goerne apart, this was a great evening that used the music of the past to examine and illuminate the catastrophes of the present.