My review of Monday evening’s Barenboim/SKB soloists all-Carter recital is live at Classical Source. I was not officially covering last evening’s performance of…

Symphony No.6 conducted by Pierre Boulez, but can tell you that his high-octane, energized approach brought forth the same level of impassioned playing he elicited from the Second and Third Symphonies. The first movement had plenty of snarl and menace; the second highlighted surprising clashes between the charming, the grotesque, and the banal manic (Mahler was an early master of the “mash-up”); Boulez summoned forth some of the most soaring and exalted playing from the Staatskapelle Berlin in the third movement. The dreamlike (and nightmarish) shifts in mood that pervade the final movement were delivered with particularly stunning impact.

But the most remarkable feature of the performance was the prominence of the many important secondary melodic lines (Schoenberg would label these sorts of contrapuntal lines as “nebenstimme” in his scores), summoned forth with a clarity I have never before encountered in the concert hall. After the concert, I ran into Henri-Louis De la Grange and mentioned my amazement at the lucidity of the contrapuntal music, and to my delight H-L said that he had complimented and congratulated Boulez backstage on that very aspect of the performance.