No works in Witold Lutosławski output illustrate the stylistic distance he travelled in the 1950s and 60s more graphically than the two that Esa-Pekka Salonen juxtaposed in his second appearance in Woven Words, the Philharmonia's Lutosławski centenary tribute. Between 1954, when he completed the Concerto for Orchestra, and 1970's Cello Concerto, Lutosławski reinvented himself totally, coming to terms with what the post-1945 generation of composers had built atop modernist foundations, and extracting just what he needed to create his own, utterly personal language.

So where, for all its energy and panache, the Concerto for Orchestra is almost suffocatingly indebted to Bartók, the Cello Concerto is startlingly original in the way it reimagines the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra, pitching the two into into a confrontation in which the orchestra does its best to disrupt and overwhelm the cello. It's not only one of Lutosławski's finest achievements, but one of the 20th-century's greatest works for the cello, from a decade that, coincidently, produced two of the others – Ligeti's Concerto and Britten's Cello Symphony.

Truls Mørk was the soloist here, defiant, pleading and intensely lyrical by turns, as well as quickly responsive to the music's moments of surreal humour, while Salonen expertly deployed the orchestral forces around him. Both concertos were wonderfully played by the Philharmonia, with the filigree of the Concerto for Orchestra's central scherzo and the motoric energy of its huge finale projected with equal vividness by Salonen. But the performance of Debussy's La Mer with which he had begun the concert was much less convincing; it was just as carefully detailed, but dully prosaic as well, lacking in atmospheric tints and textures, and in symphonic sweep.

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