In an imperfect world, intolerance, brutality and persecution are likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. That is what makes Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time as timeless as the Bach Passions on which it is to some extent modelled.

The work was inspired by the terrible events of November 1938: the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a 17-year-old Jewish boy and the bloodbath it provoked - the infamous Crystal Night. But it transforms the story into a universal lament for the victims of a world that has turned on its dark side.

The depths of grief are plumbed in five spirituals and in the first of the two performances given by the LSO under Colin Davis (the second is tomorrow night), Go Down, Moses and the final Deep River were overwhelming in their power. With the London Symphony Chorus in fine voice and the soprano soloist Indra Thomas soaring radiantly above them, the spirituals could hardly fail to be the high point.

Thomas was in any case the most communicative of the four soloists, not least because she had the courage to abandon her score. Mihoko Fujimura buried her head in hers but Steve Davislim and Matthew Rose both offered highly charged readings.

Tippett's early score already displays the gaucheness that was to become a stylistic embarrassment later on but Davis demonstrated his usual adeptness at making the fragmentary seem coherent.

The slightly later Piano Concerto is by contrast a coruscating work, whose dazzling virtuosity and breath-catching syncopations were dispatched with bravura by Lang Lang.

The brilliant cascades of tone in the first movement and the surging dance rhythms of the finale could not have been delivered more vigorously than by the young Chinese virtuoso, his performance sparkling as brightly as his jacket, apparently decorated with fairy lights.