LSO/Boulez, Barbican, London

A concert of two distinct halves: the emotionally challenged versus the emotionally charged. What are we now to make of Schoenberg's pretentious psychodrama Die glückliche Hand? I guess existentialism was once sexy, or dangerous, or both. How interesting that this piece now sounds so much of its time, while Bartok's one-act music drama Duke Bluebeard's Castle speaks as directly, as movingly, to us today as it did then.

The most interesting aspect of the Schoenberg is its use of "inner voices" – the voices that express our "unworldly thoughts" and influence our decisions. Pierre Boulez effectively "hid" the BBC Singers within the London Symphony Orchestra; they became a verbal extension of Schoenberg's febrile orchestral writing, infused as it is with allusions to Wagner's Niebelheim, and even punctuated at one point with the hammer borrowed from Mahler's Sixth Symphony.

Boulez is the dedicatee of Matthias Pintscher's elaborate orchestral evocation of Osiris, god of fertility in Egyptian mythology. Well, we all need catalysts for our creativity but, that said, Osiris is an entirely sonic adventure, an elaborate compendium of familiar and sometimes oddly inaudible effects – like the clichéd bowing of tuned percussion. Its expressivity, such as it is, centres on wickedly pyrotechnical solos for trumpet and contrabass clarinet. So, all dressed up but going where exactly? At least the neat pay-off made me smile: the sputtering trumpet now making no sound, as if it had lost its voice.

Boulez opted for the same effect – brass instruments soundlessly blowing air – for the chilling sigh as Bluebeard reluctantly opens the doors to the darkest recesses of his castle and his soul. Bartok's masterpiece highlighted the emotional redundancy of what we'd heard earlier. Bass Peter Fried had his native Hungarian to connect with and Michelle DeYoung was better than I've ever heard her, Judith's growing ambivalence and disquiet beautifully conveyed. Boulez, of course, ensured complete transparency of Bartok's miraculously simple colorations, but the Hungarian inflection of the score was somewhat tepid. What a piece, though.