Two giants of British music-making came together yesterday evening. If Thomas Adès is widely regarded as the leading composer of his generation, Simon Rattle has equally unequivocally dominated the British conducting scene for the past 30 years.

Greatness attracts greatness, and Rattle has long been espousing Adès's music, first in Birmingham, latterly in Berlin.

The composer's latest orchestral score, Tevot, was recently premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic in their home city and was last night brought by them to London to inaugurate Traced Overhead, a major festival curated by Adès, juxtaposing his own music with works that have inspired him.

Tevot is a Hebrew word capable of many meanings. It can mean musical bars or words, and is also used (in the singular form tevah) for the ark of Noah and the reed basket of Moses.

More evident, however, are the musical reminiscences: notably Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in the form of thudding gyrations and Janacek's Sinfonietta in the teeming textures, brass ululations and play of light and dark.

The material is utterly transformed into Adès's personal language, however, beginning with densely intricate contrapuntal patterns gradually overwhelmed by grinding dissonances.

Later those complex textures move down a register and become richer; through them emerge deep-bassed neo-Mahlerian arcs of the kind that Rattle traces so well.

The Berliners' commitment to this taxing, thrilling score was total and the performance masterly, just as that of Janacek's Sinfonietta was properly searing, if not - at least in this acoustic - easy on the ear.

Even more impressive was Dvorak's Symphony No 7 with which the concert opened. The composer's most Brahmsian symphony can rarely have been delivered with such heart-wringing intensity, such seething inner life, such a miraculous sense of music being made on the wing.

It was a glorious performance, launching the Adès Festival curiously but in magnificent style.

This week has been a good one for British contemporary music. On Tuesday night the ever dependable Nash Ensemble presented world premieres of works by David Horne and David Matthews, together with UK or London premieres of pieces by Harrison Birtwistle and Simon Holt, as well as Adès's Court Studies from The Tempest.

In Horne's Life's Splinters, a finely detailed, witty setting of verse by DH Lawrence, the tenor James Gilchrist, more usually associated with Baroque repertoire, showed what a consummately resourceful artist he is.

Matthews's Terrible Beauty was delivered by mezzo soprano Susan Bickley and the Nash under Lionel Friend with a fine regard for the sensuous Romanticism of this exquisite setting of Enobarbus's famous eulogy of Cleopatra.

• Traced Overhead continues to 22 April (0845 120 7500).