Listening to the latest work by the British-born but Berlin-based composer Rebecca Saunders, I couldn’t help but recall the American critic Alex Ross’s controversial judgment on postwar music in Germany: “A great tradition, with all its grandeurs and sorrows, is cordoned off like a crime scene under investigation.”

Exhibit A, your honour: Rebecca Saunders’s resolutely bleak and thoroughly introspective traces, apparently inspired by Samuel Beckett. A waffly programme encomium reported the composer’s fascination with the very basics of sound production and timbre. That’s fine: many of today’s composers share that experimental curiosity, among them Unsuk Chin, who recently showcased her stunning new cello concerto at the Proms.

The difference is that Chin’s work also gripped through its narrative structure and powerful emotional undercurrent. Saunders’s 15 minutes of damp clatters, half-projected drones and muted sirens in the dark (silence is as important to her as noise) create the odd eerie sonority, but the whole thing drips by with tedious regularity, frozen in its own sound world. Beckett had his chilly moments; he also had wit and whimsy, neither of which make it into traces.

At least the Dresden Staatskapelle had their chance to explore the “great tradition” in An Alpine Symphony, the Richard Strauss tone poem that has been this orchestra’s party piece ever since they gave its premiere in 1915. It is hard to think of a work that is more at odds with Saunders’s spartan aesthetic, but after his careful nudging through traces conductor Fabio Luisi clearly relished the chance to galvanise the orchestra through the piece with plenty of pizzazz.

And what showmanship the Dresdners brought to it. Self-indulgent? Only in the best sense: hear the Staatskapelle strings’ silky tone and rambunctious swagger — the Germans call it schwung — and you can forgive a lot of Strauss’s note-spinning and more flatulent moments of scene-setting. And there were plenty of delicate touches, too: winsome wonderment to the oboe’s sunlit solo at the summit and a lithe, bright balancing of textures in a much more playful storm sequence than usual.

A pity that the orchestra couldn’t be as commanding (or together) in Chopin, but then it was really a case of follow the leader when Lang Lang took his seat at the piano forthe Piano Concerto No 2. It’s a piece that’s very close to Lang Lang’s heart and perhaps that’s why the Chinese pianist seemed at his most infuriatingly wayward. One hushed pianissimo can be magical: plunging the entire piece into swooning halflight distorted its phrasing and dampened, rather than drew out, its glowing spirit. The low point was the usually miraculous central movement, so strung out and overmilked that at times it threatened to break down altogether.

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