This may be only a personal pet peeve, but I’ve never understood the classical music habit of equating “cerebral” with emotionally distant and even a little boring. I mean, I’m sure there are mathematicians who get pretty worked up about what they’re doing. In fact, there’s an entire subcategory of music that draws additional emotional power from its intellectual rigor. Combine that with performers eager to communicate that intricate zeal, and musical experiences don’t get much more nourishing. Case in point: the pianists Jonathan Biss and Richard Goode, who teamed up for a Celebrity Series duo recital on Sunday in Boston. They programmed a bunch of cerebral music. It was exciting as hell.

I was curious to hear how their varied tones—Goode’s burnished old-school ties, Biss’s somewhat brighter, Apollonian briskness—would mesh. Pretty well, as it turns out, thanks to some canny assignment of melodic primo and harmonic secondo parts. In more Romantic repertoire, Goode took the lower end, a lush foundation for Biss’s sparkle; for modern sounds, Biss gave the secondo crisp architecture, while Goode brought out the expressive line of the musical surface. What unites them is a similar active intelligence, the charge they get—and pass on—from engaging the source material in sharp, lively conversation.

Their reading of Franz Schubert’s D. 947 Allegro in A minor earned Diabelli’s nickname for the piece, “Lebensstürme” (”Life’s Storms”)—it was a dark and stormy curtain-raiser, the pair clearly enjoying the expressionist opportunity of Schubert’s concentrated rhetoric. Then came a rarity—Robert Schumann’s Six Canonic Studies, op. 56. It shouldn’t be a rarity, but Schumann wrote it for the pedal piano, a hands-and-feet instrument rarely seen outside of a museum. Biss and Goode performed it in a two-piano arrangement by Claude Debussy, an interesting intersection of Debussy’s ability to put his stamp on other people’s notes and Schumann’s anticipation of the musical future. The Studies are terrific music, Schumann fashioning the canonic restriction into one flawless mood after another—a sweet zephyr of flowing thirds, a rich folk-like lied, a spiky witches’ sabbath. The finale feints at a full chorale and fugue before shifting into a noble recessional to rival Elgar.

The duo’s performance of Beethoven’s own arrangement of his Grosse Fuge showed that late Beethoven still has the power to rub people the wrong way. Much of the intermission discussion was decidedly negative—the hammer and decay of the piano stripped away the richness and sweep of the string original, many people thought, and Biss and Goode’s somewhat impish interpretation of the major-key episodes trivialized a solemn monument. But I rather liked it, the harshness of the timbre, the relentless percussiveness, the emotional conception of a kind of manic-depressive colossus—an old-school punk-rock paradox, anti-social and in your face about it. It was kind of a caricature of Beethoven, but an appropriate one: his intrepidity adjusted for inflation.

Another arrangement—Igor Stravinsky’s own two-piano reduction of his 1957 ballet Agon—was a contrasting audacity, aphoristic and polished. Agon was Stravinsky’s foray into serialism, and you can almost hear him regarding each sound and harmony as if with a jeweler’s loupe, turning it in his hands, fascinated with each detail. The transcription doesn’t actually lose much in its x-ray translation—it’s what Stravinsky always tried to get orchestras to do anyway—and the performance was marvelously astute, Goode and Biss maintaining the cool-marble dramatic proportions, but finding brief pockets of warm lyricism: edge-of-your-seat beauty.

They finished with the erudite virtuosity of Debussy’s En blanc et noir, a 1915 masterpiece, one of the most understatedly devastating echoes of the Great War in the repertoire. The opening echoes Debussy’s typical Impressionism, but the effect is uneasy rather than ravishing; every gesture, every texture is a little more compressed and fraught, the splendor a little more desperate in the face of its impending demise. And then the center: soft and gnomic, a frozen restlessness, overlaid with the tolling of the chorale “Ein feste Burg,” both menace and lament. The final movement shifts the mood into the clear, dry ironies of neoclassicism, a bleak defiance. The performance was marvelous, the modulations between extroverted flair and inward rumination managed with sympathetic conviction.

The encore was another perfect match of intellectual game with expressive urgency: more Schumann, the “Abendlied” from his op. 85 Klavierstücke für kleine und große Kinder (”for small and large children”). The piece is actually for three hands—an adult, presumably, laying down the chorale-like accompaniment while a child spins out a melody. And yet, it’s one of Schumann’s most hauntingly lovely creations, rich and elegaic, the singing line taking insistently searching twists and turns. The music sounds as if it engaged every ounce of Schumann’s cerebral energy. Honestly, is any less needed to get one’s mind around the logic of the heart?

New music by Elliott Carter has, of late, come along at such a clip that hearing it always carries with it a certain feeling of playing catch-up. Such is the case with his 2008 Flute Concerto, premiered that year in Jerusalem, but just now getting its American premiere, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and BSO principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe tackling the solo part. (The concerto was a BSO co-commission.) Hearing new Carter also brings with it a kind of familiar unfamiliarity: Carter’s style—the dancing, colliding intervals, the busy, darting textures, the ever-shifting temporal flow—is pretty settled, but that style still allows for so much variety that pieces still unfold as a series of tricky surprises and unexpected landscapes. Such is the case with the Flute Concerto, one of the most intriguing of Carter’s late-career solo-and-orchestra colloquies.

Carter admits in a program note that he had long avoided the idea of a flute concerto, unsure of whether the instrument could produce “the sharp attacks that I use so frequently”. He squares that circle by frequently shadowing the solo flute with clockwork chorus of percussion—especially woodblocks and marimba—harp, and piano. That combination is contrasted at the outset with ominous, rolling clouds of clusters from the rest of the orchestra, but, in Carter’s usual fashion, those lines start to blur: by the end of the first section, it’s the orchestra doing the scurrying, in great swarms, while the flute goes its own way with long, separated tones. That sets up an ingenious bit of musical drama, as the solo and orchestral flutes dovetail to produce a long, even-paced, implacably unbroken line, a quietly insistent accompaniment to a series of colorful orchestral jabs—and when the flutes stop but the jabs continue, the discovered silences between them are expressively prominent, addition by subtraction. The center of the piece is a slow-moving singing melody for the soloist, while the orchestra bides its time in its lower reaches. It’s an exotically pretty section; for Carter, the flute’s expressive core is not in its agility, it seems, but in its sheer timbre, luxuriating in its purity in a way that calls to mind Debussy—the solo flute essay Syrinx, maybe, or the languorous clarity of the opening of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Brief instrumental interjections—English horn, piano, and, in one humorous non sequitur, a glorified cowbell—can’t derail the steady lyricism even as it shades into a faster cadenza, decorated with palpitating tremolos. The full orchestra returns, then drops to an agitated whisper for the last section; Carter simultaneously pays homage to the light finales of Classical concerti while giving the texture a bracing edge, a Shakespearian forest of dangerous magic. Sure enough, a few bumps in the night—and a brassy wail—ring down the curtain.

The performance was dazzling. Levine’s repeated programming of Carter and similar modernists over past seasons—subscribers be damned—has given the BSO a real authority in this kind of music. They get Carter—they get how it’s supposed to flow together, they get how expressive it can and should be, they dive into it with enough confidence to push the shapes of the phrases without losing the overall thread. The textures and colors snap into focus. Rowe was supremely, serenely adept in the solo part, embodying the old-school virtuosic command to make it look easy. It added a nice extra layer of dialogue to Carter’s method, an air of imperturbability to contrast with the orchestra’s telegraphing athleticism. This is the last Carter the BSO will play until next season—that’s based on the reasonably safe assumption that Levine wouldn’t be able to let an entire season go without getting something on the schedule—and, in good theatrical fashion, they left me wanting more.

The concert opened with selections from Franz Schubert’s incidental music to the long-forgotten play Rosamunde—the overture (which wasn’t actually written for the play at all, a musicological error that now requires an even longer musicological explanation, so never mind), the Entr’acte after Act III, and the Andantino Ballet Music, probably the most well-known piece from this haul. Levine, not surprisingly, brought out the operatic overtones, in the midst of a plush, dark-hued (if not dark-mood) reading, a rich restraint that hinted at untapped sensation—given Schubert’s fount of melody, and the uncanny way he could time simple harmonic shifts for optimum drama, an unexpected kinship with Verdi came to the fore. After intermission was Brahms, the Fourth Symphony; the orchestra produced a big sound, firmly-outlined opulence. The aggressive bleakness—the Fourth plays out kind of like heroic Beethoven without the heroic triumph—was almost exuberantly tragic. Levine emphasized activity and counterpoint over architecture—all the cross-rhythms were compressed into the forward edge of the sound, broken floes jostling for position, the late-Romantic ground fracturing beneath Brahms’ feet, with no prospect of safe haven.

The solo violin repertoire is pretty extensive, but the solo-and-I-mean-solo violin repertoire—four strings, one bow, no accompaniment—is somewhat less so, which is one of the reasons you don’t see violinists taking the stage alone as often as pianists. But the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff took the plunge on Sunday for a Celebrity Series recital in Boston, and just about pulled it off.

Bach was the rock on which Tetzlaff built his program—one each from the Partitas and Sonatas which still are the base of the solo violin pyramid. Tetzlaff’s choices showed he wasn’t messing around, incorporating two of the most monumental solo string essays extant—the second Partita, with its famously massive concluding Chaconne, and the third, C-major Sonata, with its comparable second-movement fugue. The readings neither fetishized period fidelity nor ignored it, but came out as a hybrid, one more interesting in light of the intervening history. Tetzlaff often avoided the long, full bowing and omnipresent throb of Romantic practice, but in a way that played off a century-long expectation of baseline opulence, using both the tonal fragility of a slow-moving bow and the lean whine of vibratoless sound to rachet up dramatic tension. Again and again, Bach’s piled-up double-stops and suspensions would build up to a taut keening before breaking like a wave into ornamental vibrato.

The Partita—in D minor, the saddest of all keys—was given an unremittingly dark cast, grim and rhythmically searching, Tetzlaff deliberating over each phrase. The audience suddenly felt compelled to applaud after the Gigue and before the Chaconne, an odd collective choice—I’m fine with applauding between movements or not, but to forget that the most famous violin piece Bach ever wrote is yet to come was a little odd—and so the epic was not a cumulation, but an appendix. Nonetheless, Tetzlaff gave it that same single-minded brood: no kaleidoscopic parade of moods, but an unwavering thread of suspense, each return of the repetitive chord progression another turn of a Hitchcockian screw. The Sonata had more Classical distance, more balance of contrasts, in bowing and demeanor, the Fugue an epic of expanse rather than immensity. Tetzlaff threw in a wink at the end, an interpolated diminuendo trill on the final note, tucking the phrase into his pocket.

The Bach played to one of Tetzlaff’s strengths, his conception of music’s dramatic content as inseperable from its physical production. Four minatures by György Kurtág played to another: Tetzlaff’s concentrated intelligence. Three movements from Signs, Games, and Messages—a collection periodically growing since 1989—showcased a dry wit: a “Perpetuum mobile” that grinds to a halt as soon as it starts, then continually interrupts itself; a “Hommage à J.S.B.” that recalls a typical Bach manifold compound melody, except that the strands refuse to harmoniously coexist; and “Zank—Kromatisch,” a chromatic argument that turns out to be a darkly comic shout-down. The outlier was a “Doloroso,” originally written for viola, a gentle lament that tilted at the threshold of audibility. Tetzlaff conjured each mood with sustained immediacy. That precision was then interestingly applied to Eugène Ysaÿe’s G minor Sonata (op. 27 no. 1), putting the emphasis squarely on the music’s early modernist touches—the ghostly tremolo, sul ponticello recapitulation in the first movement seemed a holdover from the Kurtág set. Ysaÿe’s second-movement “Fugato” only glances in the direction of Bach’s giant, but Tetzlaff’s playing in the Finale echoed the most fraught moments of the Partita, an orgy of furious double- and triple-stopping.

I said Tetzlaff just about pulled it off; the qualifier was his closing set, four of Nicolò Paganini’s famed 24 Caprices. The Caprices are a seminal document in a certain kind of violin virtuosity, a sort of frictionless series of technical miracles; Tetzlaff’s musical temperament seems to run in the opposite direction, however. Halfway through the set, Tetzlaff felt obliged to tell the audience that the New England cold had infiltrated Jordan Hall in the form of a draft, and that his fingers were starting to feel the effects—but I think it went beyond that. Tetzlaff can handle Paganini’s demands, but he’s not interested in their magic-act aspect; as in the Bach and the Ysaÿe, his virtuosity was athletic and muscular, mining technical difficulty for heightened expression. The Caprices work best as a conspiracy between performer and audience, where everyone knows how hard they are, but the violinist is able to produce the illusion that they’re no trouble at all. With Tetzlaff, you could hear the difficulty even as the difficulty was surmounted. His encores were far better: more Bach, a Gavotte of finely-eched grace, and more Kurtág, “In memoriam Tamás Blum,” a tribute to the Hungarian conductor played with sustained, intense calm. The upside to a one-man show is that you don’t need to show off in order to show off.

Full-on modernist essay? Check. Carefully selected re-run? Check. Show-offy warhorse? Check. Two-and-a-half-hour concert? Check. Having missed almost the entire first half of the season due to back surgery, James Levine returned to the Boston Symphony Orchestra podium this week with a program of near-stereotypical Levine ingredients, as if to conjure the illusion that he had never left.

The modernism came courtesy of Elliott Carter: his 2003 piano concerto Dialogues, with the plays-everything French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the keyboard. It was a bit of making up for lost concerts for Levine, who would have conducted the piece during the 2008 Tanglewood Carterpalooza if not for emergency kidney surgery. (It also was no doubt a bit of a warm-up for the American premiere of Carter’s Flute Concerto on next week’s concerts.) Dialogues shows just how much room for interpretive initiative there is in Carter’s unruly musical conversation pieces. Robert Sheena gave the plaintive English horn part that kicks off the roundtable—and periodically returns to offer commentary—a bit of an insistent edge, a shading that played nicely off of Aimard’s tone, crisp and clean but with a hint of Glenn-Gould-ish melancholy lurking in a softened phrase here, a limpidly voiced chord there. (Aimard was also particularly good with Carter’s signature scorrevole passagework, an ominously even buzz of notes.) The orchestra was in fine fettle as well; Levine’s penchant for making every shape just a little bit bigger and more extroverted reaped rewards, Carter’s music taking on an expressive, almost expressionistic sheen.

Berlioz’s Harold in Italy was the re-run, and something of a do-over; when BSO principal violist Steven Ansell and Levine tried the piece last summer, a fortissimo Tanglewood rainstorm left much of the proceedings in silent-movie territory. Here, the pilgrims’ march could cast its opiate spell unmolested, its minimalist stasis delicately implacable. The rest was just over-the-top enough to do Berlioz justice, saturated color, rhythmically tight, loud climaxes. Ansell laid down a silky-smooth line; if he seemed more a sardonic Byron than a brooding Byronic—he seemed to be enjoying the brigands’ orgy in the finale immensely—it suited the performance as well as the piece, Berlioz’s Italian sojourn blown up to mythical, big-screen proportions.

Having served Franco-American (Carter) and Franco-Italian (Berlioz), Franco-German opened the second half: Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written for Paul Wittgenstein and painting the composer’s Gallicisms in darkly rippling, Wagnerian colors. (Aimard was again the soloist.) Then more Ravel to finish: the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet the BSO has programmed several times in recent seasons and also recorded. Both pieces were, in these performances, collections of striking moments that didn’t add up to a really compelling whole. The moments were almost enough—the volcanic opening crescendo in the Concerto was a visceral thrill, and the rip-snorting precision in Daphnis’s “Danse generale” was certainly not something to take for granted. But the pieces were the most alive in their centers—the slow section of the Concerto, the “Pantomime” in Daphnis—the places where the music is supposed to be episodic, sequential tableaux of contrasting textures. I wonder if Levine’s straightforward vigor, which is a boon in other parts of the repertoire (clearing up the murk of Debussy interpretation, for example), isn’t as well-suited to Ravel’s ambiguous glamour, revealing the trick’s secret by shortchanging the misdirection that makes the trick work. I kept thinking of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” which imagines the painter scolding his doctor for thinking his vision needs repair. “I tell you it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,” Monet insists, “to soften and blur and finally banish / the edges you regret I don’t see”.

Claude Monet, Ice Floes, 1893 (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

James MacMillan’s 2008 St. John Passion had its American premiere this week with its dedicatee, Sir Colin Davis, conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus; in it, the Scottish composer tackles one of the most narrative musical genres there is. Passions—the gospel reportages of the arrest and execution of Jesus, if you missed Sunday School—have a long musical history. Settings have ranged from ritualistic, liturgical austerity (particularly in Medieval and Renaissance times) to expressionist dramatic heat (including the avant-garde funhouse of Penderecki’s 1966 St. Luke Passion, before that composer’s turn to greeting-card neo-Romanticism) to deliberate dialogue with outside traditions (witness Osvaldo Golijov’s own, exuberantly Argentinian St. Mark Passion from 2000).

MacMillan’s entry tries for a hybrid between the first two, with only occasion peeks behind Door #3. MacMillan is a particularly devout Christian—program notes quoted him describing his spirituality as proudly “radical and countercultural”—and, for all his modernist collage, he doesn’t make much effort to translate the images or lessons of the Passion into contemporary terms, as, for example, Bach did, with his added, theologically reflective arias and chorales. Aiming for immediacy instead of asserting relevance plays to MacMillan’s compositional strengths, energy and color. But it comes at a musical price, at least for half the evening. This St. John Passion so neatly bifurcates into dubious and dramatically solid that one might be tempted to speculate as to a spiritual reason that the piece only really finds its footing once Jesus is crucified. It’s simpler than that, though—once the cross is raised, John is able to usher most of the supporting characters offstage, and MacMillan is able to start writing music and not just narrative.

MacMillan’s casting is schematic: Jesus is sung by a baritone (Christopher Maltman), his lines portentiously ornamented. A semi-chorus provides all of the narration, set in largely syllabic harmonized chant. The rest of the parts are taken by the larger full chorus—Judas, Peter, Pilate, the high priests, the (to no end of historical misuse, specifically Jewish) mob. The music moves between all of these elements: MacMillan writes of how he was fascinated by the tension between the “cool purity” of liturgical music and the more intense emotion of opera, offset by “elisions and cross-fertilizations” between the styles. But MacMillan doesn’t quite modulate the contrast in musical time; the high-drama operatic elements accelerate the arrow of time, but the chant-like elements freeze it in place. When the narrative is at its swiftest and most Hitchcockian—John setting up his oppositions as tense interrogations—the shifts come so often that the musical discourse can’t build up a head of steam, as the drama is yanked in and out of gear.

To his credit, MacMillan throws everything he knows at the problem: the piece may, for a long while, seem to be switching channels every twenty seconds, but MacMillan packs a lot of music into each of those twenty-second spots. The narrative chorus’s chanting is harmonically beguiling and slippery, with exotic turns and trills on unexpected syllables. Characters get corresponding orchestral colors, sometimes ingenious—Pilate’s frequent accompaniment of nervous woodblocks and col legno double-basses—and sometimes interesting non-sequiturs—the three solo violins offering smeared, polytonal jabs behind Christ’s weighty sound bites. MacMillan isn’t afraid to go big, either—in the full chorus’s first incarnation, as the soldiers accompanying Judas, they pronounce their quarry, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in opulent Holst-gone-Hollywood style; during Pilate’s interview with Jesus, orchestral explosions are scattered throughout the scene, disorienting psy-ops bursts. Tonal, atonal, polished counterpoint, aleatoric atmosphere—the piece has it all.

MacMillan nods in the direction of Bach’s commentary by punctuating each section with a bit of choral Latin. The first few are voluble, sometimes violent, sometimes vigorous (Peter’s betrayal is forgiven with an in-your-face triumphant “Tu es Petrus.”) But it’s only at the end of the fourth section—just before intermission—that the drama coalesces around a rich setting of the “Crucifixus” from the missal Credo, the choir morphing through mysterious harmonies while dissonant solo lines are passed around the orchestra. The pattern continues post-intermission: the drama is more sustained the less MacMillan has to navigate between narrative voices and the more he’s able to interpolate. Christ is driven to Golgotha with an opening instrumental interlude, all galloping high horns and whiplash strings; the soldiers divide Christ’s garments with some marvelously outré deflating glissandi from semi-chorus and trombones alike. Mary’s appearance at the cross is the occasion for the work’s most magical sleight-of-hand: the chorus men murmuring a Stabat mater while the women layer fragmentary lines from the Coventry Carol and the Lutheran Passion Chorale on top, a gorgeous conception. MacMillan then brings in the Improperia, the Reproaches, that collection of Old Testament fragments refashioned as an epic scold from the mouth of Christ, frequently folded into Good Friday services (as well as another convenient Trojan Horse for anti-Semitism, although the church has walked back that interpretation as of late, insisting that the Reproaches rebuke everyone equally). MacMillan has said that he included it in order to portray Jesus’s humanity through his anger; one suspects that it was also to give the baritone something substantial to do (and Maltman rose to the occasion, assertive and ringing), as well as to lead into the denouement with a stretch of purely operatic force. The piece concludes with an instrumental movement that once again introduces several styles into the mix: stark, intertwining Shostakovich-like strings, a bit of Elgarian brass glimpsed through 1960s avant-garde sound effects. It almost seems to spin the Passion’s long-awaited dramatic amalgamation off into a diffuse collection once again.

The performance was excellent, the orchestra game for whatever bright swath of paint MacMillan threw their way. The chorus reveled in the opportunity for sheer visceral impact—as is the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s wont—but also produced some spellbinding clouds; sometimes the singers pared their straight-tone softnesses down to dangerously airless production, but their Marian vision, for example, was a lovely saturated quiet. Davis’s conducting was unostentatiously effective; it’s an achievement to lead a performance this good of a piece this massive without calling attention to oneself, but Davis not only kept everybody on track, he kept everybody committed to the musical effect. MacMillan’s Passion is, after all, all about effect, even when the effects come so frequently as to cancel themselves out. But the piece is at its impressive best when the composer isn’t expending his formidable skill at giving each line its due, but when he cuts loose from the narrative and lets the music bloom. Is that shortchanging the spiritual dimension? Bach didn’t think so—in his Passions, he raced through the narrative at the speed of recitative, budgeting his time in favor of musically expansive interpolations. The story wants telling, but music wants to read between the lines.

Here’s what Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto sounds like:

The Long Engagement was painted by Arthur Hughes in the 1850s. The title refers to the fact that the pictured woman’s middle-class parents would not allow her to marry her pictured fiancé, a curate, until he could attain a better-paying position higher up in the church hierarchy. (If you look closely, you can see that the ivy climbing the tree has just about obscured where the curate once carved his beloved’s name.) The Long Engagement is rather pointed in its social commentary, at least by the standards of Victorian painting, but is entirely in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite style—the emotional anxiety of the situation is translated into a profusion of painterly precision, a lush riot of leaves, flowers, moss, fabrics.

And that’s what Elgar tended to do in his deepest and most personal pieces—and the Violin Concerto was the most personal of them all. Elgar was acutely sensitive to his outsider status, sharing with a not insignificant number of British artists the duality of ostracism and celebrity—Wilde, for instance, or Forster, or Elgar’s posterious rival for the mantle of British classical music, Benjamin Britten. Elgar was an alien on religious, geographical, and financial grounds: a Catholic, lower-middle-class provincial who married up (to the consternation of his bride’s family), and who seemed to carry a keen sense of tentative status even as he attained the aristocracy himself. The Concerto seems to exorcise that tension in an abundance of detail, already extensive themes developed in every which way, a sort of manic, voluble beauty. The Concerto can claim a Pre-Raphaelite connection—much of the material was inspired by Elgar’s relationship with Alice Stuart-Wortley, daughter of John Everett Millais, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But the wellspring was Elgar’s own inner passion, tamped down by Edwardian reserve in the man, given free rein in the music. Elgar described the Concerto to a friend as “too emotional”—with both self-effacement and pride, one suspects.

The BSO doesn’t play much Elgar. I’m not sure why—they seem temperamentally suited to its high-strung grandeur, to its family resemblance to Berlioz, a Boston speciality. Nevertheless, it’s been up to Sir Colin Davis, a regular guest podium presence, to keep most anything beyond the “Enigma” Variations in the BSO’s repertoire. Lucky for us, he knows his way around Sir Edward. Again, Davis’s Berlioz experience probably helps—Elgar is similarly a composer who resists “selling” or explanation, coming off at his best when his excesses and quirks are not polished away.

Davis just recorded the Concerto with Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider, marking the centennial of the work’s premiere. Znaider—who was playing the “ex-Kreisler” Guarneri violin that Fritz Kreisler, the Concerto’s dedicatee, used for the 1910 premiere—is a fascinating performer. His tone seemed to follow from his dramatic conception—a firmly bowed, tightly-coiled first movement, increasing freedom in the middle Andante, exploratory and intimate in the finale’s daringly ruminative cadenza. Znaider risks technique in the name of expressiveness—some of the explosive passagework might have been cleaner, but less exciting; some of the sustained lyricism might have been more centered, more secure, but then less haunting. And Znaider had a superb sense of how his solo line fit into Elgar’s kaleidoscopic orchestration and conception, always knowing which piece of counterpoint to shade his tone into, where his cadences fit in the harmonic evolution. It was a dashingly smart interpretation.

Davis brought similar flair from the orchestra. The opening movement was a roiling, riveting thing, full of bold rubato and sharp colors—the last movement began with a magical rustle reminiscent of Mendelssohn—an apt connection, given Mendelssohn’s Victorian deification. The culmination of the expanse was lovely and elegiac, Elgar again turning the Romantic discourse defiantly private.

The concert opened with Mozart’s Symphony no. 38, the “Prague,” one I sometimes find a bit confounding, mainly because—full disclosure—I can’t help listening to it in the wake of Beethoven. The symphony anticipates Beethoven in so many regards—its tight construction, its contrapuntal textures—but doesn’t go where Beethoven goes; given raw materials that would become associated with statements of concentrated emotional determination, Mozart instead puts together an elegant Rube Goldberg machine. This performance seemed neither here nor there, not refined enough for the music to work on its own terms, not energetic enough to conjure up a Don Giovanni-esque proto-Romantic Wolfgang. (Davis seemed to be aiming for the latter, trying to pull the group into a more grand tempo in the slow movement, for example.) I would guess that the group spent most of their rehearsal on the Elgar, to its benefit, but the BSO doesn’t seem to be able to comfortably slip into Mozart on a moment’s notice the way they can with Brahms, say, or Debussy. (When they really focus on it, as with their mini-Mozart-festival last season, they actually turn into a fun, buoyantly scrappy Classical orchestra.) Still, the reading had enough laudatory moments—the quietly sassy exponentially-generating string rhythms in the opening, some gorgeously phrased woodwind byplay—to keep the balance in the black.