The LA Phil had more than a major birthday to celebrate at this concert, which marked 100 years to the day since its first performance in October 1919. It could afford to congratulate itself for reminding the world, now more than ever, that if a classical symphony orchestra doesn’t relate to and physically resemble its home city, it’s on borrowed time. The cameras at the centenary concert picked out the figure of Deborah Borda, who as erstwhile CEO can take most of the credit for the LA Phil’s transformation. Her smartest move was hiring Gustavo Dudamel as chief conductor – the perfect fit for America’s most forward-looking orchestra and most Hispanic city.

There’s plenty of context for all that on the hagiographic documentary, The Tradition of the New. But the increasing diversity of the LA Phil’s audience is as evident from the audience shots on this DVD as on regular Friday nights at Disney Hall. The concert unites the three living musicians who have served as the orchestra’s music director. You can see the logic for including each piece but at the same time, from an orchestra that can party, the serious programme means the party never really gets started.

Plenty of the Phil’s other strengths are on show, chief among them the rhythmic sophistication and clarity instilled during 17 seasons under Esa-Pekka Salonen and his diet of 20th-century music including Lutosawski. The Fourth Symphony (an LA Phil commission) contains mind-bogglingly complicated rhythmic counterpoint in its harbouring of tension and expectation. It’s no showpiece but it does call for exuberance, flair and character (particularly in its aleatoric passages) and gets them in this otherwise studied performance. There’s an evocative bit of direction when the camera pans out from Disney Hall’s French-fries organ case as the first movement splits into irregular shards.

The orchestra plays lovingly for Dudamel in the suite from Stravinsky’s The Firebird, finding even more sensuality here than in Zubin Mehta’s airy La valse. Dudamel has the best technique of all three and is great to watch on screen, the music always seeming to surprise him and widen his eyes still further. As undemonstrative as Mehta in his own way, he adds snap to that rhythmic diligence but the performance is never garish or fake.

Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth was written for the occasion and for participation from all three conductors; it’s an extraordinary sight to see them waving their arms around in different styles a few metres apart, like silent chamber musicians surrounded by a mass of noise. The score has a chorale move at three autonomous speeds across three divisions of the orchestra, which the conductors must dock in to one another at particular junctions. The feeling is truly that of the title: music of the spheres, colossal planetary rotation, the grandest of grand gestures cast in Bjarnason’s galactic orchestral upholstery. As in the related piece Emergence, when the harmonic resolutions align the feeling is of a universe in harmony. Odd to have no music by an American – and a celebration piece that moves so slowly and with such distance – but the LA Phil has championed the Icelandic composer-conductor like one of its own. Thousands of pieces of silver paper flutter down from the Disney Hall roof when the music finally evaporates. That’s all folks!