Three Places in New England - Ives

Violin Concerto in E minor - Mendelssohn

Symphony No 5 - Prokofiev

The San Francisco Symphony, founded in 1911, may never have made it to the top rank of American orchestras, but it's had a pretty distinguished history. Before the current incumbent, Michael Tilson Thomas, its music directors have included Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips and Seiji Ozawa; and, since the 1980s, it has had John Adams, Charles Wuorinen and George Perle as composers in residence.

The opening work of its NCH programme last night, Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, stated clearly its stand on taking American music seriously. Ives was one of the oddest musical pioneers in all of history, a man who quietly dedicated himself to composing in the early years of the century music that other men weren't yet even dreaming of. His music has lost nothing in strangeness with the passing of time.

Tilson Thomas is a straight-talker of an Ivesian. He runs a tight show, pointing, as it were, a bright beacon to capture Ives's layering in sharp relief (no mud-murky, tangled jungles here) and yet retain the extraordinary sense of mystery which makes this music the thing of wonder it still is.

Gil Shaham, the soloist in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, showed signs of a split musical personality, sometimes conventional in the well-worn lingerings of rubato and emotion-tweaking portamento, at other times altogether more exciting, impetuous, even gruff. I couldn't help feeling that a bit more of the latter character would have made for a more interesting performance.

In Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony Tilson Thomas's highly-analytical approach, coupled with limitations of lyricism and penetration from the violins, brought an episodic feel to the music-making. The performance was at its best in the chattering certainties of the second movement - a sonically spectacular showing of the band's virtuoso qualities at their best - and in the piling-up of tension at the very end.