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After intermission came Boulez’s testament to Stravinsky. Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1921) is a piece he conducted at his very first concert. "It’s intricate," he told Guzelimian, explaining that the handful of alternating sections are "immediately recognizable but unpredictable." It’s a memorial piece for Debussy, though it doesn’t imitate Debussy. It’s more like a Russian funeral ritual, with an austere sonority that first appears in Zvezdoliki ("The King of the Stars"), Stravinsky’s earlier and rarely performed short choral work, and later in Symphony of Psalms, and later still in Requiem Canticles — the winds replacing the sonority of an organ, sounding like what Boulez called "a human organ." There were a few ragged entrances in this LSO performance, but the annunciation was cheekily angular, the chorale warmly consoling. The motoric rhythmic drive looked back eight years to Sacre. The finale, with its obsessive ritualistic repetitions (another echo of Scare), was the most moving I’ve ever heard — nostalgic, mysteriously beautiful, piercingly elegiac. "You cannot really explain the mystery," Boulez told me.

Ten years ago, in a series of 70th-birthday concerts with the LSO at Carnegie Hall, Boulez conducted a Sacre that was one of the most overwhelming musical experiences of my life — more powerful than even his best recording. "The Rite is very close to my heart," he said. "My first encounter with something radical. I was discovering modernity — it corresponds to a part of me." Just as, he continued, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire "corresponds to another part of me. I can unify these parts in my own world — and create something else." In his conversation with Guzelimian, he talked how Stravinsky, like Picasso, turned into a modernist within a very short time — the three-year period from The Firebird, with its roots in Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin, and Petrushka "to the Rite, in which Stravinsky completely found his own vocabulary and personality." Like Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Sacre, he explained, was a "manifesto of modernity" before Stravinsky went off into neo-classicism and many other directions. "He began like an arrow. And then there were many arrows." The major elements of that modernism had to do with violent rhythm "and the succession of very closed forms, one after another" — a paradigm for the two later pieces on the program.

This time, Sacre was even more extraordinary. The opening bassoon solo, played by Rachel Gough with enormous freedom and high-wire, edge-of-your seat rubato, was like a wail of grief that was also indistinguishable from a wail of sexual desire. That vocal bassoon seemed to be calling into existence an entire world. And the rest of the performance, alternating cataclysm and delicacy (down to the sexy little upward run of the flute at the very end), had that same all-embracing, all-inclusive expansiveness. I’ve never heard anything like it, not even from Boulez.

I asked him how he achieved that quality. "If the music is too quick, it loses its value, its weight — especially in the final ‘Sacrificial Dance.’ There’s only one dance that’s quick, the ‘Dance of the Earth,’ " which ends the first half. And he articulated with lingual dexterity the "digita-digita" rhythm he had aimed for.

He seems very happy with the new recordings. He was especially pleased with the unexpected results of the Bartók disc. All three concertos had been originally intended for pianist Krystian Zimerman, with whom he’d recorded the two Ravel concertos. But after recording the First, Zimerman found it hard to work up the others right away — and there was an obligation to get the recordings produced. Boulez then heard Leif Ove Andsnes on television, "quite by chance," and knew immediately that he was "the perfect match" for the vigorous Second Concerto. The Third was more complicated. DG had suggested Hélène Grimaud, but Boulez had never heard her. He was going to conduct it in LA with Mitsuko Uchida, with whom he’d recorded the Schoenberg Concerto, but she got sick and had to cancel. Grimaud was available, and they worked well together at short notice. He praised her "refined" playing in the second movement, which has seldom sounded prettier. In retrospect, he said, he liked the way the three soloists, playing with three different orchestras (Chicago, Berlin, London), revealed different facets of Bartók, and how each concerto emerges with a different character.

He also singled out the profundity of baritone Thomas Quasthoff’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer"), with the Vienna Philharmonic, on the Mahler song-cycle disc. If Boulez had recorded nothing else, this performance would be one for the ages, exquisite in the subtlety and intimacy — and tenderness — of its collaboration between conductor and soloist. The orchestra is equally beautiful — a transparent lacework — in the Rückert-Lieder and the Kindertotenlieder, but Violeta Urmana and Anne Sofie von Otter aren’t in Quasthoff’s interpretive league.

And might Boulez be returning to Boston? He said he has an open invitation from the BSO, but he’s already committed to the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra, to many European engagements, and to his composing — and he’s approaching 80! Although now that "Jimmy" (James Levine) is musical director, he says, the invitation is more tempting than ever. Let’s hope.