That the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic should have commissioned a percussion concerto from former Police drummer Stewart Copeland may be less surprising than it seems. Since the group disbanded, Copeland has become an in-demand composer of film soundtracks, written a ballet based on King Lear and even an opera set at the time of the Crusades, Holy Blood. Poltroons in Paradise is a 15-minute showpiece for four extremely busy percussionists, based on an elaborate post-revolutionary programme in which Copeland claims "to imagine a cadre of starving, hitherto excluded intellectuals swaggering through the palace of a fallen regime". The scoring has a gilded, highly reflective surface that possibly evokes the gold-plated golf clubs discovered in the ousted Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich's abandoned residence. It's structured around the familiar, minimalist trope of a repetitive melodic loop, on top of which Copeland piles a barrage of funky syncopations whose most striking figure is a jangling cadenza for three triangles. It builds to such a pitch of skittering hyperactivity that by the end Copeland seems to be intent on developing his own genre – maximalism, perhaps.

Vasily Petrenko is so peerless in the Russian repertoire that it's easy to overlook what a convincingly naturalised Englishman he has become. The programme opened with a sparkling account of Benjamin Britten's final work – a resplendent, Purcellian ode for Queen Elizabeth completed shortly before his death, followed by a reading of Elgar's overture In the South that drank deep from the invigorating tonic of the composer's walking tour in Italy. But the highlight was a brazenly sensual account of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, featuring outstanding contributions from baritone Mark Stone and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir. The jazz influence of Walton's sacred setting seems almost sacrilegious, but when Petrenko began to swing the ensemble, the writing really was on the wall.