Even when sticking to a fairly conventional formal scheme, Thomas Adès’s works generally carry descriptive titles. There is a string quartet called The Four Quarters, for instance, and a violin concerto with the subtitle Concentric Paths. But his latest work comes with no suggestive name; it is a piano concerto, pure and simple. First performed in Boston last March, the concerto was the centrepiece of Adès’s concert with the London Philharmonic and with soloist Kirill Gerstein, for whom it was written.

The concerto certainly does what it says on the label: a three-movement form with rampaging outer movements and a reflective central andante, it often sounds like wrong-note Rachmaninov. There are echoes of other 20th-century composers, too – such as Prokofiev, Britten and Ligeti – as if it was a commentary on the art of concerto writing in the wake of late Romanticism, a demonstration there is still some mileage in the rhetoric of that lost era. There’s plenty of ferocious solo writing, which Gerstein clearly relished, and some metrical intricacies for the orchestra to negotiate, but too much seems overly insistent, as if determined to batter the audience into approval.

Holst’s suite The Planets followed the premiere, but Adès had begun with a much less familiar work. Compared with Sibelius’s other tone poems, Nightride and Sunrise is rarely performed, and it’s easy to know why. For a composer who was such a master of organic musical development, it is a curiously piecemeal work, and almost seems like a set of sketches for a symphony yet to be written. It’s by no means straightforward to perform, either. The London Philharmonic rose to those challenges, but it all seemed a bit of an effort.