London Symphony Orchestra / Adams, Barbican Hall, London

Whether he likes it or not, John Adams will probably go down as the man who maximised minimalism. He laid hands on those arpeggios going nowhere and gave them direction. While others were treading water, Adams swam. He had two ways to go: straight ahead, with the current, or back to before. And as the three works in this London Symphony concert ably demonstrated, he usually managed both at the same time.

Lollapalooza is American slang for something outlandish. Because it's American, it's jazzy. Because it's outlandish, it's an outsized symphony orchestra trying to wrap itself around some nifty syncopation, like an elephant in a Bob Fosse routine. As elephants go, the LSO are more twinkle-toed than most; but if anyone knows how uncoordinated this piece can sound, it's the composer – and here he was, head in score, emphatic of beat, clinging fast to every displaced barline. You wanted him to kick loose a little, to let this mother swing.

The question loomed again during the opening movement of Adams's piano concerto Century Rolls. The inspiration for the piece were those pianola rolls, where the past was preserved in the patterns of countless holes punched in parchment. There lies another Adams paradox. Precision here is subject to trial and error of the human kind. Small wonder that Joanna MacGregor checked and double-checked her score to make sure all the music was there before beginning.

But MacGregor's flirtatiousness grew with the piece, pedalling its way through myriad stylistic allusions from Fats Waller to Erik Satie. Satie is a presence throughout the gorgeously scored slow movement, and anyone who needs convincing of Adams's skill in that department need listen no further: his aural imagination here is extraordinary.

There's a lot of retrospective tinkering in Adams's pieces but only one instance of shameless genetic engineering: Harmonie- lehre, a man-made "big bang" of post-Mahlerian pretensions. As Adams says: "A conceit I could only get away with once." People get this piece wrong. Its irony lies in the way it wilfully courts the late-romantic excesses minimalism sought to purge. Overripe, overwrought, Harmonielehre becomes its allusions, like the dissonance of Mahler's incompleted 10th Symphony, which impales Adams's second movement. The LSO gave it awesome heft. For the thrillingly preposterous finale, ET phoned home and now he's wishing upon a star. A quintet of horns power this trajectory into the unknown while the pulsations of four marimbas, timpani and bass drum sound like minimalism's "last stand", before it vanishes into another of musical history's black holes.