London Symphony Orchestra/John Adams, Barbican Hall, London <!-- none onestar twostar fourstar fivestar -->

American composers may age but their music remains eternally young. Something in the national character makes it so: the pioneering spirit, the need to go forth, tough it out, stake your claim, stamp your identity. At 60, John Adams is still doing just that. The first thing you notice about any of his pieces - and about him as a conductor of them - is the energy. That and a strong sense of place. He's a transplanted Californian through and through. His pieces were born big to grow bigger - because there was room for them to grow. The landscape liberated them.

A piece like The Dharma at Big Sur (for electric violin and orchestra) could only have been conceived in a place where big skies meet big surfs. It's a great intake of breath at the prospect, the way you might feel after being on the road for days on end and suddenly reaching the edge of the world.

The glamorous Leila Josefowicz was suitably plugged in to her oddly eviscerated-looking violin and made something emotive and innately sexy of the portamento. What she was less effective in conveying was a sense that the work was a perpetual invention of the moment. Its jazzy riffs-cum-ragas sounded too "written out". Until, that is, the climactic square-dancing took hold and with a bow shredded of its horse-hair, she finally rode the big rollers.

The LSO is a great orchestra for Adams. Their bigness of tone and brightness of timbre sit well with his splashy and extrovert pyrotechnics. Slonimsky's Earbox, which opened the evening, was like turning the ignition on Adams' entire output. This pulsation of myriad scale patterns takes off down some virtual highway inevitably to achieve burn-out.

That's a road trip and a half from the most "meaningful" of the evening's works. On the Transmigration of Souls was written to commemorate those who died on 9/11 and is one of those pieces where the weight and expectation of the occasion simply stifles inspiration. In a sense, no piece Adams could have written would have been fit for purpose but his decision to make a choral collage of texts taken from missing-persons flyers was a woeful miscalculation. Musically redundant, spiritually demeaning - boy, when the Americans get it wrong, they get it very wrong.