The London orchestras may not be famous for their commitment to new music, but the Philharmonia's Music of Today series is an outstanding exception to that rule. The latest season of these free, early-evening concerts began with a performance of Peter Eotvos's Chinese Opera, conducted by the composer himself, and serving as a prologue to the orchestra's main event, a concert with its music director Christoph von Dohnanyi that included Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and a specially satisfying account of Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, with Yefim Bronfman as the thoughtful, delicate soloist.

Eotvos's piece has been heard here before - the London Sinfonietta (who else?) introduced it seven years ago - but it wears well. Nowadays he is equally successful as a composer and conductor, but when he completed Chinese Opera in 1986, Eotvos had spent a decade as musical director of Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. That knowledge of the orchestra shines though every bar of this series of vivid sound pictures, each of the movements (the Philharmonia played four of them here - two shorter comic interludes were omitted), dedicated to a present-day stage director, including Peter Brook and Patrice Chéreau.

There is nothing particularly Chinese about the music but the joyous use of colour in the instrumental writing, combined with musical gestures that jump from one idea to the next with almost cinematic conciseness, conjure up the idea of abstract opera. Since he wrote the piece, Eotvos has gone on to write real operas - four of them so far, with another due at Glyndebourne next summer - but, as this wonderfully assured performance from the members of the Philharmonia demonstrated, Chinese Opera has all the makings of a classic.