Listening to this piece can be like standing in the middle of a whirlwind, but Boulez steered it all effectively, allowing us to hear the odd motic cross-reference as the lines and shapes flew past – a fleeting echo of the opening trumpet solo, or of a once wide- arching string line.Then there was Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, conceived by its composer with at least a partial hope of popularity It is now a rarity. Other passages, however, were dispatched with a brisk, Gallic matter-of-factness. By all means cut out sentimental poeticising, but only if you can put something equally strong in its place.But the performance of Elliott Carter’s A Symphony of Three Orchestras was sheer virtuosity. The climax of the central “Jeux des Vagues” was superb: a great wave breaking, with every level of Debussy’s rich texture clearly audible. But between the flashes of colour were stretches of greyness where the notes simply seemed to run according to some pre-conceived master plan. The Scherzo was loud, flashy and brutal (as it plainly should be), yet Bartok’s finale, the strangely negative Funeral March, was merely efficient.There was a similar feeling for me at the end of the final item, Debussy’s La Mer. Not cold, grey and remote this time, and with more revelatory or physically exciting moments than the Bartok, but still a collection of fine moments linked by a kind of Apollonian machinery.

Every now and again a woodwind or string phrase stood out with telling clarity. Parts of the first movement of Bartok’s Four Orchestral Pieces were surprisingly, voluptuously beautiful – even if there was still a slight sensation of the beauty being enjoyed at a full arm’s length. At Sunday’s London Symphony Orchestra Barbican concert he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal, and generously praised by Alfred Brendel.It came, paradoxically, in the middle of a concert that was neither vintage Boulez nor a return of the wilfully detached sound-director of the Sixties. Others dismissed him as “dry”, “clinical”; his first recording of Debussy’s La Mer was, according to one critic, “cold and grey as a remote northern sea”.Now Boulez is a Grand Old Man of the Baton, widely recorded and currently receiving almost as many decorations as he once attracted brickbats. Pierre Boulez

The Barbican, London
Once upon a time, was the world’s most controversial conductor Hans Keller complained about his “non-phrasing”. Sean Welsh’s choreography often illuminated the music, as when the three nymphs posed against pillars or moved into post-rite of spring attitudes, or when Harlequin (the impressive baritone David Stephenson) enticed Echo (Anna-Clare Monk) into his stage routine. Perhaps the richest man in Vienna had a point.Further performances: Theatre Royal, Glasgow (0141-332 9000) 21, 24, 26, 28 March; Edinburgh Festival Theatre (0131-529 6000) 14, 16, 18 April..

Only the Composer and Music Master seemed cast against the score in terms of their age, and Diana Montague recovered from a nervous start to deliver an intense, moving salute to “the holy art of music”. The cast was generally strong, all the way from Nigel Douglas’s brilliantly observed Major-Domo, though the busy harlequinade, down to Peter Bronder’s idiomatic Dancing Master and Richard Morris’s hyperactive Wigmaker. The action was updated to around 1930, and Tim Hatley’s designs acknowledged, and even celebrated, a certain element of kitsch in the opera itself. Here the musicians relished all the demands the score makes on their soloistic capacities and then rose to the challenge of that long climax; it was overwhelming in intensity.Martin Duncan’s witty and daft production made the two worlds interact from the beginning. She has the rare gift of authenticity; every note and every word count and communicate as truth.

Bacchus is notoriously one of Strauss’s least grateful tenor parts but John Horton Murray was so much at ease in the role that he enjoyed himself with infectiously bacchic abandon.When Richard Strauss contemplated the opera’s end, he worried that a chamber orchestra “would be inadequate for my Dionyisiac urges” At one point he considered adding a full orchestra. Wave upon wave of erotically charged music flooded up from the pit and the stage: Anne Evans was in radiant form in the title role. The interpretation paid dividends during the work’s disproportionate climax, when the abandoned Ariadne assumes Bacchus is Hermes, the messenger of death, while the god greets her as another Circe. Zerbinetta’s coloratura was never merely spiky – Lisa Saffer displayed an almost flawless technique and, just as important, a feisty, fearless stage presence. Opera: Ariadne auf Naxos

Theatre Royal Glasgow
LAST year at the Edinburgh Festival, Scottish Opera presented the 1912 version of Ariadne auf Naxos. Now they stage the 1916 version, in which Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s prologue replaces Moliere’s play.

The work’s problematic history is sometimes reflected in performance: when “the richest man in Vienna” orders that the commedia dell’arte troupe intrude into the world of opera seria, it occasionally seems as though the brittle comedy and self-indulgent tragedy bring out the worst in each other.Conductor Richard Armstrong favoured leisurely tempi, which gave room to breathe and emphasised the sensuous qualities of Strauss’s music. In orgiastic porno sex, we’re told, the body is “hypnotised by its own performance”, a “somnambulist celibate machine” aspiring to “endless, sinless, illusionless performance”.Which all sounds very metaphysical: you’d never guess that there’s another machine in constant motion in this world – a hard, vicious economic one.The answer to “What are you doing after ?” turns out to be very simple: you’re feeling short-changed and pretty damned depressed.. Since they have never been properly present, though, the point of the disconnection is lost. Oh yes, they’ve thrashed around and done cod routines as Tristan and Issolda and as the voyeuristic filmer and the filmed in the movie Peeping Tom and they’ve spouted pseudo-profound slogans.But one of the irritating things about is the sense that the two of them are floating around in conceptual space – too clever, jokey and knowing to be on any real continuum with the issues they are fetchingly fleshing out.The intellectual pretensions of the piece, though, are ghastly: this is a show for people who think that snitched soundbites from cribs like Baudrillard for Beginners constitutes thought.