Missa in Angustiis. Mass in troubled times. There was a logic in programming Haydn’s D minor Mass on the Armistice Centenary day. The final words of the mass, dona nobis pacem, would be the right ones to end this day of reflection.

The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle have been launching their new season with a mini-festival, if not so-called, mixing and matching some delectable repertoire. This was their third concert in four days – and its programme was wonderfully shaped, bringing together three works written within 11 years of each other, each from a composer with a unique voice that spoke for his whole nation in one way or another.

A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten.

1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism.

Shostakovich is ideal for Nicola Benedetti. His music requires effortless and understated virtuosity, as well as a confident and commanding maturity of interpretation. Benedetti has been demonstrating these qualities since her late teens, and all were evident in this reading of the First Violin Concerto, which proved an intense and compelling listening experience.

In the 27 years since he first conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Sir Simon Rattle has steadily integrated its moodswings and high contrasts into a reading of a piece which now feels more than ever like the work of a man engaged in a form of symphonic stock-taking – before, in the Tenth, setting out on bold new paths.

Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the composer and puritanically regarded as the end of the line by supposed Mahlerians. Not Simon Rattle.

When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart.

Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice.

Cheers and huzzahs greeted the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle on the Barbican stage last night before the London Symphony Orchestra had even played a note. The 10-day festivities to open his tenure as principal conductor evidently worked a treat. The hall was full for a lengthy and – on the surface of it – unlikely splicing of Austrian Romantic angst with Baroque arias and dance.