ACKNOWLEDGED MASTERPIECE Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra is a staple of the international repertoire. Through the looking glass   John Adams at the Gardner Somewhere along the line, John Adams went from being a member of an upstart group of composers looking for a new musical language to being the paramount voice of American art music. It’s not clear exactly when this happened — perhaps it was 1987, when Nixon in China showed that minimalism could drag American opera into the spotlight. Or maybe it was a few years ago with El Niño, his epic retelling of the Nativity story in modern garb. Whatever landmark you choose, by now Adams is far more likely to be treated as Grand Old Man than as purveyor of the Next New Thing. So what made Sunday’s "Composer Portrait" at the Gardner, with the crack ensemble Alarm Will Sound (imported from New York’s Miller Theatre), so refreshing is how it restored some of the edge to his music that seems to recede in his better-known works. It also showed that Adams is one of music’s great foragers, a composer who can grab almost anything that’s handy and press it into service in his own inimitable voice. Ever wonder what a minimalist chamber piece would sound like with some James Brown added? Here was Scratchband, the 10-minute opener, to show you, its slow-changing harmony moving from one groovy idea to another. How about combining Lisztian acrobatics with John Williams–ish pomp? Pianist John Orfe played a breakneck solo arrangement of the orchestral fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons presented an entire mythic vision of America. Starting from "imagined musical models" — melodies written in the style of a shape-note theme, a Western song, and a 19th-century ballad — the movements transformed the accompanying ensemble into a folk combo, a 1930s dance band, or anything else that crossed his mind. At every turn the clarinet — an instrument both Adams and his father played — seemed to speak wisely about stories both personal and historical. (Elizabeth Stimpert was the excellent soloist.) And for those who’ve wondered what might result from mixing early Schoenberg and cartoon music, here was Adams’s great Chamber Symphony to provide the answer. It’s hard to see how edgy chromaticism could be married to the zany energy of Wile E. Coyote, but that’s just what it sounds like. The final movement, "I Roadrunner," captures the riotous overflow of ideas and throws them at the listener almost without pause. Adams, you understood at the end, is a man who takes music, but never himself, with the utmost seriousness. That went for the musicians as well. The room was full, and throughout the concert you could see heads bobbing to the endlessly shifting rhythms, on stage and off. Alarm Will Sound have been called "the future of classical music." I sure hope so — though not for their funky appearance or self-effacing stage presence, or even for their brilliant musicianship. What makes them special is the visual joy they bring. You can understand why the music is great not just from what they play but from their palpable interaction on stage. It reaches out and makes you a part of the musical experience. BY DAVID WEININGER

Just when you thought it was safe to get home from a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert early, James Levine offered up the longest program of the season — but also one of the best. Celebrating its 125th anniversary, the BSO put under one umbrella four of its most notable commissions: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930); Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1944); Henri Dutilleux’s Symphony No. 2 (1959); and Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto (2003). This became a mini-history of the orchestra’s acomplishments.

The Stravinsky and the Bartók are acknowledged masterpieces, staples of the international repertoire: the Dutilleux and Carter aren’t as widely known but should be. (The first recording of the Carter, led by Oliver Knussen, is just out from Bridge Records.) These pieces have complex musical interrelations. Their orchestrations are all refined yet harmonically pungent. Bartók, Dutilleux, and Carter presented the BSO with variations on the "concerto for orchestra," in which members or sections of the larger ensemble (instead of a single more-conventional concerto "soloist") interact with the rest of the orchestra. Dutilleux’s The Double includes a separate 12-member chamber orchestra. Its glamorous harmonies and syncopated rhythms owe a lot to both Stravinsky and Bartók. A little pizzicato section in the Bartók stood out because it followed the Carter, which is structured around seven pizzicato episodes.

The program lasted nearly two hours and 40 minutes. The Bartók didn’t begin until 10 pm, and maybe the late hour explained the signs of fatigue, a certain dynamic restraint — why some of the composer’s abrupt, even violent contrasts lacked their usual punch. In the "Interrupted Intermezzo," an oboe folk song that morphs into an expansive viola melody gets interrupted by the "Going to Maxim’s" theme of Shostakovich’s then-recent Seventh Symphony, in which Shostakovich transforms Franz Lehár’s lighthearted celebration of carousing into an ominous (and endless) military march. Bartók seems to be mocking Shostakovich’s obsessiveness. Most conductors make this intrusion quite nasty (just as Shostakovich was thumbing his nose at the invading Nazis). For Levine, the oboe theme flowed a little too smoothly into the contrasting viola melody, and the nasty Shostakovich "interruption" became merely another charming incident. Still, most of this fresh, engaging performance rippled with incident and vivid playing.

The opening Dutilleux sounded both more elegant and more astringent (especially the exuberant jazziness of the fiery finale, Allegro fuocoso) and more mysterious (especially the dissolving, upward-spiraling final phrases) than when Seiji Ozawa led it in 2000. To me it’s Dutilleux’s best orchestral piece, and I can hardly imagine its sounding better.

The spiritual aspirations of the Dutilleux segued eloquently into the Symphony of Psalms. John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang (without scores) with repressed fervor, conveying the hieratic devotion of Stravinsky’s cool yet intense settings of three Psalm passages of supplication, expectation, and praise. The piece had tremendous tension because everything seemed held in, hushed — wary of crude outburst, however tempting.

Elliott Carter, who turns 97 December 11, was on hand for the weekend’s first performance of his Boston Concerto. At a colloquium arranged by Harvard’s student composers, he mentioned that he’d been present at the first BSO performance of the Stravinsky. Except for his difficulty in hearing some questions, he seemed the picture of vitality and alertness.

He told the composers that every piece of his was an "adventure," an exploration of new territory. In the Boston Concerto it’s the "pointillist texture" of the pizzicato and its suggestion of the sound of rain. The epigraph is from William Carlos Williams’s "Rain," a love poem. (Carter dedicated the concerto to his wife, Helen, who died at age 95, a month after the premiere.) But the literary source could easily have been Shakespeare’s "The rain it raineth every day" because if anything this piece depicts life as a series of interludes — nostalgic, passionate, jazzy, tender — surrounded by both storms and nurturing showers of every sort before the final raindrops trickle away. Levine led a dazzling performance, more authoritative and captivating than Ingo Metzmacher’s at the premiere.

Levine’s idea for new pieces follows the lead of Serge Koussevitzky, the BSO music director who commissioned both the Concerto for Orchestra and the Symphony of Psalms, which he repeated two months later, then scheduled again the following year. If the music gets into the orchestra’s blood, there’s a better chance of its getting into the audience’s.