Detroit So/ Segerstam, Royal Festival Hall, London<br></br> Topologies, The Warehouse, London<br></br>Paul Lewis, Wigmore Hall,

Detroit So/ Segerstam, Royal Festival Hall

Following some high-profile transatlantic no-shows, the entire Detroit Symphony Orchestra turned up for business as usual on its European tour. It didn't bring its music director Neeme Jarvi, but his illness was signalled long ago and his replacement was, as Michelin guides say, worth the trip. Leif Segerstam came into his own after the interval, because the start was an orchestral calling card: part of the Motorcity Triptych by Detroit's composer in residence Michael Daugherty.

Like the conductor, the composer ought to be getting more performances here. He has a sharp, knowing style of attractive surfaces and slick technique, and Saturday's piece, Rosa Parks Boulevard, worked as a virtuoso showcase for the players in general and the trombones in particular. Their solo parts are inspired by African-American preachers. Parks was the Alabama woman who wouldn't move from her bus seat at the start of the civil rights movement, a matter in which "there is still much to be done" according to Daugherty's note. Including, perhaps, giving commissions such as this to African-Americans, who might make the solo material less patronisingly folksy. The Detroit trombonists played it with such flamboyance that they appeared to be sending it up.

For Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 5 the orchestra set a tone of forthright, unfussy vigour, delivered with precision. Lars Vogt matched it for forthrightness and even more for technique. He sounds as if he can do anything with a keyboard; some rising crescendo scales near the end spoke of fourth and fifth finger power that other pianists dream of. What he chose mostly was solid, rather square rhythm, and fruity phrasing when the music gets juicy.

His most fetching habit was a spectacular withdrawal of tone, usually to get out of the way when the woodwind had something more interesting to do. Somehow it drew attention to itself by its very suddenness. The best sustained experience came with his first solo of the slow movement, which he managed to keep beautifully simple and straight, at least until the second time around. By then the feeling was already more mannered, and a horrendous crash into the finale destroyed the atmosphere altogether.

Segerstam is like a prolific Finnish version of Oliver Knussen, a composer-conductor permanently on the fringe of international stardom. By mid-life he has written over 50 symphonies and grown into a Father Christmas lookalike, while becoming progressively more dynamic and perceptive in action. Even Arvo Part's Cantus had a brilliant, almost restless performance, which brought out the ever-changing inner events of this apparently static music, as the rhythmic activity repeatedly halved. Warm and lucid string tone kept the elegiac character intact.

Vital rhythms were a key to the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, along with deft handling of what can sound like stark transitions. Melodies were freely shaped, speeds balanced to build towards and wind down from peak moments of high excitement, while the weight of tone was finely controlled to have extra bite available for the final dance. Unanimity among the strings, woodwind encouraged to phrase out of their skins, all contributed to the dazzling, powerful music-making.

As for conductor's wiles, the Brahms Hungarian Dance encore was exaggerated to comic effect, yet it possessed a manic intensity that kept the audience spellbound. Engaging and exciting, this musician should be booked up by orchestras everywhere while he can still get on to the podium without using the piano hoist.

Topologies, The Warehouse, London

The British Music Information Centre's dozen pre-Christmas concerts at The Warehouse, entitled The Cutting Edge, are one of the best things to have happened to London's new-music scene in ages. But, now in its third year, the series seems to be suffering a bit of post-honeymoon depression. Last Thursday, Topologies' belated 50th-birthday tribute to James Dillon saw the hall rearranged, seating an audience (of comparable modesty to the one Psappha managed in the opening concert the week before) along one side. This allowed plenty of room for the extensive array of percussion and keyboard instruments deployed not only in the main concert, but also in a short pre-concert sequence of tribute pieces by five of the composer's colleagues.

The latter was an excellent idea – though it would have been a courtesy to its audience to avoid starting it 35 minutes late. The piece I enjoyed most was Joël F Durand's TIODHLAC (the title was never explained) for clarinet, played by Roger Heaton; its expert control of line through a kaleidoscopically shifting sequence of speeds, moods and techniques should help this little piece's survival.

At the start of the main programme, Guy Cowley's account of Dillon's early solo clarinet piece, Crossing Over, lacked sufficient precision and energy. Much more impressive were the first and third volumes of The Book of Elements for solo piano, part of an ongoing collection of five volumes begun in 1997. Dillon's move from modernist density to music of sometimes magnificent allusion and transparency is an old story by now, and it goes further back than many still think. Yet even in his orchestral works, he can scarcely have achieved anything more compelling than this 35-minute double sequence.

Even pieces driven more by rhythmic repetition, such as the short third piece of Book III, draw on what Graham Hayter's sensitive programme book essay calls "cultural memory". The Book of Elements takes in, and in some senses takes on, the piano repertoire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Debussy seems a significant reference point) and, against considerable odds, builds its evocations into a rich and tangled web with a thoroughly modernist ebb and flow, rather than yielding merely a postmodernist ragbag. Though Ian Pace currently seems to be developing a beautifully limpid touch, he was generally more successful at dealing with this music's mechanistic and sheerly gestural dimensions than at shaping some of its more elusive details.

What a pity that this concert's second half – the London premiere of the complete, 40-minute cycle for female voice and unconducted ensemble, L'évolution du vol, from 1991-3 – was spoiled so drastically by a singer frankly incapable of rising to its challenges.

Inconsistent and sometimes damagingly cautious-sounding characterisation of this curious composition's folk-inspired materials and some intermittently very ragged ensemble compounded the problem. If I hadn't been following a score and heard the work before, I'd have been completely mystified by the whole thing.

Keith Potter

This series continues every Thursday to 13 December (020-7499 8567)

Paul Lewis, Wigmore Hall, London

Paul Lewis has recently been one of the BBC's "New Generation" musicians, so he's had a good deal of exposure playing and broadcasting, and the opening recital of his Schubert Sonata series was almost full. He began with the E flat major Sonata, D568, a warm-hearted and graceful work, almost entirely without the shadows which gather in Schubert's later sonatas, and it suited Lewis down to the ground – or rather, he found the appropriate response to this winsome music in an ideally poised performance.

The second sonata he played was the A minor, D784, written six years later. It's a much more serious and dramatic work, whose stern austerity is relieved by stormy contrasts and a consolatory middle movement. Misha Donat's programme note called the sonata bleak, but Lewis's account of it was a bit too gentle for that to be felt. He was very ambitious in striving to achieve Schubert's extremes of quiet at the expense of his underlying severity of purpose, so that the first movement seemed a shade timid, and the piano almost failed to speak at the end of the middle movement. The last movement ran its course effortlessly, and the fiery double octaves near the end didn't seem to cause Lewis any trouble, erupting quite naturally, with just a slight easing of the tempo to make them possible.

The D major Sonata, which came after the interval, is a much happier piece despite being later – we tend to think of Schubert's music darkening with his declining years. It is a long work in four movements, and it asks for strong characterisation to carry it through if it's not to outstay its welcome. The almost alarming shifts of key in the first movement suggest a manic sort of energy which was missing here, so the result was less than overwhelming. The songlike second movement was disappointing, too: neither sufficiently appealing nor deeply felt to raise it above the ordinary. And the scherzo should have been more robust, while its contrasting sections needed a little more charm.

As for the finale, it has one of those walking-whistling tunes over a tick-tock accompaniment that can easily irritate, or, if too expressively touched up, sound silly. It didn't sound silly, but it did begin to wear a bit thin. Lewis may play with impeccable taste, but as yet, he's an emotional lightweight.

The Schubert series continues on 2 Dec, 7 Mar & 5 May (020-7935 2141)