Prom 24, Royal Albert Hall, London: 'An exhilarating collision of precision and all-out abandon'

Marianne Crebassa, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Voices and Esa-Pekka Salonen celebrate American composer John Adams' 70th birthday

Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (Suntory Hall)

America's favourite living composer, John Adams, turns 70 this year. Proms celebrations are many and varied, but already this concert by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra stands apart. Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music (A symphony by any other name) is a gleeful, all-American reclaiming of this stronghold of Western Art Music, with electric guitar, keyboard, and bagfuls of percussion making a joyous incursion into the classical symphony orchestra. The result is an exhilarating collision of precision and all-out abandon perfectly suited to Salonen, the work's original commissioner, and his orchestra.

Capturing the opening flute theme in all its sly ingenuousness, the Philharmonia proceeded to balance architectural elegance and grungy motoring churning to dispatch the piece in all its iridescent glory.

Adams' orchestral colours are a natural fit for French music – here Ravel's orchestral song-cycle Scheherazade. Making one of the most exciting Proms debuts we've seen yet this season, young French mezzo Marianne Crebassa was a seductive storyteller indeed, spinning her perfume-sliced tales with hypnotic ease and a generous, dark-hued tone.

With Stravinsky's blissfully idiosyncratic Canonic Variations on Von Himmel Hoch as an opener (intricate woodwind and brass counterpoint like gilded embroidery on the dark velvet of Bach's chorale melody) this was a typically Philharmonia programme – a mixture of the familiar and the strange, the comforting and the unsettling that was totally satisfying, both in concept and ecstatic execution.