If a composer writes a piece paying tribute to cinema, will the results inevitably sound like a film score? John Adams’s City Noir, given its European premiere last night with the composer conducting, suggests that the answer is “Yes”. Does it matter? Perhaps not.

As his title implies, Adams sets out to evoke the murky world of film noir, and paranoid string figures, stabbing brass, swooning sax and fiddly jazz drumming take us straight back to the Fifties. As the work unfolds, however, the colouring becomes bolder and brighter. Sometimes the music is hard-driven but frenzied activity repeatedly gives way to a musical clearing, momentarily recalling the calm after the storm in Britten’s Sea Interludes, which Adams performed at Sunday’s concert with the LSO.

Other reminiscences pile in, notably Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A Bernstein-like passage has you expecting the orchestra to leap to its feet and shout “Mambo!” and there are glimpses of the quasi-minimalist music Adams himself was writing in the Eighties.

The whole is suffused with longing for a past in which big, bold gestures and firm-footed melody were the order of the day. And yet so affectionate is Adams’s manipulation of his musical memories that City Noir emerges as a dazzling showpiece. It may look resolutely backwards but it knows where it’s going.

Stravinsky popped up earlier in proceedings. His solemnly wacky Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments defies smooth articulation, and this performance had its rough edges and wonky articulation — but with soloist Jeremy Denk’s involuntary foot-stamping emphasising the piano’s percussive role, it had a certain acrid charm.
Adams opened with two of Colin Matthews’s sumptuous orchestrations of Debussy’s Preludes.

By rights they should sound overwrought but they convince listeners that if Debussy had been Matthews, this is precisely what he would have written.