Philharmonia / Salonen, Royal Festival Hall, London

Esa-Pekka Salonen's first concert as the Philharmonia's new principal conductor comprised a starkly contrasted, yet subtly complementary choice of three modern classics: Bartok's brutally expressionistic suite from The Miraculous Mandarin (1919), Prokofiev's waywardly lyrical second Violin Concerto (1935), and Stravinsky's neo-baroque opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927).

The Bartok, still one of the most dissonant scores in the repertoire, was stunning, from the rampaging strings and brass evoking the tumult of a city street, by way of the shrieking apostrophes that greet the entrance of the Mandarin, to the lumbering chase music as he pursues the Girl – whose enticements were so graphically evoked by the lead clarinet of Mark van de Wiel.

Anything following such a performance could have sounded anticlimactic. Yet Salonen had evidently placed it first to emphasise the gentle melancholy with which the solo violin feels its way into Prokofiev's Second Concerto. Vadim Repin was the soloist, a big man handling his instrument like a toy, but sustaining an exquisitely sweet arc of sound across the clockwork accompaniments of the slow movement, and finding drolleries aplenty in the bizarrely lolloping finale.

As Stravinsky admitted, Oedipus Rex was put together from whatever lay at hand: baroque rhythms and aria forms, scraps of Verdi, military fanfares, oompah hints of circus and music-hall. Yet the scoring grips disparities so powerfully together that the climax can't fail to awe. And so it did, despite a rasping, inflexible Oedipus from Stephen Gould. Ekaterina Gubanova was an impressive Jocasta, while Franz-Josef Selig's Tiresias and Andrew Kennedy's Shepherd also stood out.