The Music of Louis Andriessen, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

In an earlier review, I commented on this festival's curious paucity of mature compositions by Louis Andriessen. Major works such as De Materie and Trilogy of the Last Day have been performed here during the past few years, though you have to go back to Meltdown 1994 for the last complete London performance of the former.

While the seminal, rarely heard Hoketus seemed an obvious omission, the punchy, vintage early-period Workers Union turned up twice: the first in a new version for solo percussion (brilliantly delivered by Tatiana Koleva) that brought a welcome energy to the female group Electra's show, otherwise the festival's low point. But Orkest de Volharding's zesty performance of the original was marred by gratuitously applied out-of-sync video.

You could argue this was to overprivilege the "minimalist" Andriessen, and that the planners of this event did their subject a favour by emphasising his diversity. That's a fair point, not least since this composer has always worked, Stravinsky-like, with a variety of materials and styles. Yet this "decentring" of Andriessen was emphasised via music of decidedly variable quality, including some of his recent smaller-scale pieces.

At least Garden of Eros, Andriessen's new string quartet given its British premiere by the Arditti Quartet, offered a beguiling, if brief, alternation of melodic rumination, accompanied by the "white" sound of string harmonics, and the more full-frontal rhythmic energy typical of the Andriessen of old.

During the London Sinfonietta's final performance, impressively sung and played under Reinbert de Leeuw, ofWriting to Vermeer, the opera Andriessen wrote with Peter Greenaway, I feared the anonymous vocal lines and blanched "modern Polaroid picture of a baroque orchestra" that dominate this 100-minute opera's first half would, in tandem with the opera's pointedly non-narrative structure, lose its audience. But Andriessen is nothing if not cunning. The rise in tempo, energy and reference to baroque models that help to propel the work to a conclusion – stunning even without the coup de théâtre flooding of the stage of the original production – made it impossible not to consider this opera one of its composer's best works.