John Adams conducted the UK premiere of his Son of Chamber Symphony at the end of this all-American programme. The jokily titled follow-up to his cartoon-inspired 1992 Chamber Symphony is again broadly light-hearted, much of it covering familiar Adams territory.

The lively accents of the opening movement and the cool celesta-backed accompaniment of the second are amiable enough. But it's in the finale that Adams is at his most brilliant. The "News aria" from his 1987 opera Nixon in China provides source material with which Adams then runs free with an unstoppable momentum that achieves exhilaration. There may be nothing new here, but the presentation of old ideas is unfailingly skilful.

A more expert conductor than Adams would have made more of it, however. And throughout the programme, there was a sense of earnest endeavour rather than of the virtuoso Sinfonietta players giving of their best. More enthusiasm might have helped prop up Paul Dresher's Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band, too. The overall result left little more than a sense of nostalgia for the kind of late-Romantic concerto that much of Dresher's score pastiches, his amplification supplying a soft-focus graininess to the piece's revisiting of a black-and-white-movie soundworld.

David Lang's 1993 ensemble piece Cheating, Lying, Stealing attempts a sonic exposé of Lang's own supposed negative traits, in deliberate contrast to the noble self-portraits other composers sell us. However, it is hard to see how its dull phased repetitions reveal anything except a poverty of imagination. At least the concert's opener, John Cage's Credo in US, manages to entertain, as well as offering a sly dig at American self-belief.