Addicts of the cult TV teen drama Skins would have been well ahead of the game at the world premiere of Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days: Piano Concerto with Moving Image, given at a sell-out Festival Hall last night, with the composer conducting.

For Adès, now 37 but still regarded as one of Britain’s hottest young musical talents, this collaboration with his civil partner Tal Rosner, who created the Bafta-nominated opening titles for Skins, was a first late dip into the world of multimedia. Musically, too, the work, a retelling of the Genesis story of creation, marks a startling departure. The edgy, often ironic vitality of earlier scores has relaxed into a new fluidity and lyricism.

Even explosive moments of chaos remain airborne rather than dark and dense. Unexpectedly, the sound world draws on an English tradition, with echoes of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge and Elizabeth Maconchy in the string writing, which is at times divided into 10 richly sonorous parts.

Scored for a medium-sized orchestra with a variety of bells and marimbas — it is accompanied by Rosner’s oscillating abstract images, displayed on six large screens. The Festival Hall and Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles, manipulated beyond recognition, provide visual inspiration (I swear I also spotted Hungerford Bridge). These kaleidoscopic effects mesmerise to such a degree that you fight to concentrate on the music, which functions more as film score than equal partner.

Soloist Nicholas Hodges delivered the aurally uncomplicated piano textures impressively, though somehow always in the background. I’d be interested to hear it again, this time with my eyes shut.

Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974), was a turning point in rescuing new music from the far polar regions of atonal angst. It’s a mystery how this fiendishly difficult hour-long work is done, who cues whom and why no one loses track of the subtly changing repetitions. The miraculous Sinfonietta players dazzled.