This felt like a very LSO way for the London Symphony Orchestra to open its season: two 20th-century American symphonies, both of them big, bold showpieces with something to say about the time in which they were written. Bernstein’s Symphony No 3 has a huge role for a narrator who speaks words written by Bernstein himself, against a choral backdrop of the Jewish Kaddish prayer, sung in Hebrew and Aramaic. Composed either side of the Cuban missile crisis and dedicated to the memory of John F Kennedy, it is unmistakably a product of the anxieties of the early 1960s. But have those anxieties ever really gone away?

Thanks to the blazing conviction of Antonio Pappano’s conducting it didn’t feel at all dated here. The playing was bright and precise, the London Symphony Chorus equally responsive in a piece full of challenges: at one point half a dozen of them had to become conductors, each directing a sub-group of their colleagues as they sang in different tempos and rhythmic patterns. The Tiffin Boys’ Choir proclaimed their first entry through cupped hands so as to cut through the heft of the orchestra, before joining in the dancing rhythms of the finale. At the work’s centre, the soprano soloist Katharina Konradi sang a serene lullaby.

What really set the tone was Felicity Palmer’s narration. Bernstein’s text is a monologue addressed to God in which the conductor addresses God almost as an equal – plenty of jokes to be made there. It moves from devotion through anger to a kind of reconciliation. Dignified yet animated and absolutely sincere, Palmer judged it perfectly.

The mood turned springlike after the interval: the world had seemed a different place in 1946, when Copland’s Third Symphony was borne on a tide of postwar optimism, its finale growing out of the composer’s reworking of his own Fanfare for the Common Man. Pappano drew out the symphony’s electric primary colours and constantly evolving textures with irrepressible energy. Thanks to the glinting percussion section – including, at floor level, an anvil, gleefully thwacked with a claw hammer – this was an often noisy performance, but an irresistibly joyous one.

• London Symphony Orchestra’s season continues