It has become a bit of a commonplace to note that Jean-Yves Thibaudet wears concert outfits designed by the once and future punk couturier Vivienne Westwood. But it was not inappropriate to keep in mind the pianist’s appreciation of eccentrically chic attire during his recital at Tanglewood on Thursday, completing a survey of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano music. Tailoring, after all, demands that stylistic provocation remain grounded in craft and discipline—the coat still has to fit, the material still has to drape, the shape still has to flatter. And if Thibaudet’s Wednesday recital (which I reviewed for the Boston Globe here) focused on Ravel’s jeweler-like side, Thursday’s program portrayed Ravel as a master tailor, expertly stitching bolts of pianistic virtuosity.

It was four kinds of fabric, more or less. The opener, the Pavane pour une infante defunte, joined two: transparent music-box delicacy, and Godowsky-like control over multiple musical strands and ideas in distinct layers, even as the strands change registers, hands, even fingers. Jeux d’eau added a third, those quintessentially Ravellian torrents of liquid passagework, fiendishly fine needlepoint that Thibaudet tossed off with unusual style, lightly pedaled and uncannily smooth.

The first of the Valses nobles et sentimentales brought the final material, one that had only briefly appeared in Wednesday’s recital, but became a prominent feature of Thursday’s: extroverted, muscular abandon, high-wire athleticism. The Valses unfolded in almost modular fashion, the various strategies deployed from waltz to waltz like swatches: silkiness in the second, rapids in the fourth, more roller-coaster daring in the seventh, precise strata in the epilogue.

Thibaudet’s facility with each type of cloth was balanced by his cognizance that, in Ravel’s music, the fabric is not the suit itself: the challenges are merely the medium for the design. Again and again Thibaudet employed Ravel’s technical propensities to accent the structure—subtly highlighting an inner layer of melody, breathless speed giving it momentum, flurries of ornamentation cushioning its landing. Seams were not hidden; Thibaudet’s juxtaposed, Classically-delineated sections and phrases actually emphasized the music’s more modernist contours.

The second half brought increasingly ornate patterns. The Sonatine was a more linear quilt, the fabric gradually changing its weave: the opening movement’s airiness settling into deep-toned juxtapositions, the motives arranged into clear stacks, the finale’s running streams tumbling into a white-knuckled ride.

Gaspard de la nuit, on the other hand, Ravel’s most dazzling essay for the instrument, was downright exponential. The delicacy of “Ondine” was layered into multiple dimensions; the myriad layers of “Le gibet” were each distinct and evenly sustained to the point of disquiet. And in “Scarbo,” Thibaudet unleashed unrelenting speed in precipitous storms, fireworks shot off in dangerous proximity.

His encore, Federico Mompou’s “Jeunes filles au jardin,” cut Ravel-like ideas along more conservative lines; in comparison, Ravel’s tailoring seemed far more daring and provocative, a match for Thibaudet’s outfit, a Westwood-stitched, subtly anarchic patchwork of satin and matte. But the quiet, suddenly muted close of “Scarbo” had also, perhaps, revealed the conscientious craftsman, the smallest sartorial detail finished with exquisite care.

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BOSTON—Everything new is old again at the Boston Early Music Festival, which kicked off its biennial stylistic rewind yesterday. The centerpiece of the festival is always opera—this year, it’s Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” (the previously announced staging of Christoph Graupner’s “Antiochus and Stratonica” was postponed until 2013, which you can probably blame on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 if you try hard enough)—but it’s the festival’s other concerts where you can get the best sense of what “early music” happens to mean at the moment.

Monday night’s concert featured the Ensemble Zefiro, specializing in 17th-century wind music; like you might expect from a band concert, the feel was loose and casual. The group accessorized their black suits with stylishly loud ties, and their swinging, triplet-based inégales in the opener, a Sonata for two oboes, bassoon and continuo by Evaristo Felice dall’Abaco, contributed to the jazz-club ambience. Festival co-director Paul O’Dette was a guest on theorbo (that expanded lute with a five-foot neck, a perpetually potential Three Stooges skit), substituting for Evangelina Mascardi, stuck in Italy on doctor’s orders; ensemble director and oboist Alfredo Bernardini introduced O’Dette during his solo in the final “Ciaccona vivace,” then the rest of the group joined back in to jam over the repeated changes.

A feature of the ensemble’s playing was a prominent rubato, ample instances of the sort of taffy-pull tempo variations that a previous generation of early-music practitioners might have avoided as Romantic affectation. In Vivaldi’s Sonata in C minor (RV 53), oboist Paolo Grazzi (with his mirror-image brother Alberto anchoring the continuo group on bassoon) pulled phrases out of time with a juggler’s daring. Immediately following was more Vivaldi, Lorenz Duftschmidt taking the lead on Viola inglese for a Sonata in E minor (RV 40), which confirmed another overall tendency, that of not confusing technical cleanliness with domesticated timbre—all the players seemed eager to let the the natural rusticness of period instruments sound with retro exuberance.

The Grazzi brothers were the bemused straight men to Bernardini’s goofier energy; prior to Antonio Lotti’s “Echo Sonata” a 4, Bernardini indulged in a nice little whoops-I-left-my-music-backstage pantomime, leaving the stage, then staying there to play his distant reflection of Paolo Grazzi’s lead. Harpsichordist Luca Guglielmi continued the rhythmic nonchalance with his solo, Baldassare Galuppi’s Sonata III in C minor; dating from 1781, the music draws on both Baroque and Classical fads, with a frequent grid-like Alberti-bass accompaniment that Guglielmi let his right-hand themes swim in and out of.

Even the profuse ornamentation fit the playfully blithe atmosphere, little flurries rendered softer than the prevailing melody, impertinent asides rather than imposing decoration. Ensemble Zefiro embodies the prevailing wind in historically-informed performance: wear your learning lightly.

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PARIS — Critical attention is usually paid to the opening of a show, but sometimes it’s fun to catch the end, to see what has and hasn’t fallen into place or shaken out. Traveler’s fate put me at the last performance of a five-week run of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” by the Opéra National de Paris, and among some musical treasure was a lesson in the hazards of relying too much on star power — and also in the difference between directorial concept and directorial craft.

Director Gilbert Deflo revived the production he created for the Opéra in 2007; taking Verdi’s censor-mandated relocation of the action to America and running with it, Deflo gives us a Lincoln-esque Riccardo presiding over a council displaying an uneasy mix of blue and gray uniforms, with Ulrica’s sanctuary a fever-dream of post-bellum plantation voodoo owing more to Hollywood than history. The monumentally minimalist décor was at least non-invasive, and at best impressive, especially the opening scene’s council chamber — a white amphitheatre, with Riccardo’s Lincoln-Memorial throne dwarfed by an enormous eagle — and the concluding ball, a grid of pillars and shifting screens efficiently suggesting the maze of intrigue.

In fact, the whole “Birth of a Nation”-meets-”Angel Heart”-as-directed-by-Leni-Riefenstahl setting was an unusually apposite concept, which made it acutely frustrating that Deflo seemed content to merely throw the scenery out there but not follow through on any of the provocative implications. (Come on, a set-up like that and not a single Klan hood? Where’s Regietheater button-pushing when you really need it?) Maybe Deflo was afraid a European audience wouldn’t pick up on a more detailed evocation of Reconstruction — or maybe he’s uninterested in such detail himself. But it left the specifically American nature of the update oddly disconnected from the actual staging.

Then again, the staging was also often just sketched in, and here’s where the whole star question comes up. For the opening of the run, the Opéra had a couple of bona-fide stars to play Riccardo and Amelia (Ramon Vargas and Deborah Voigt) but they were replaced for the last few nights by Evan Bowers and Angela Brown, who both, while displaying some accomplished singing (more on that in a minute), did not project any real grand-opera star power, either from within their characters or from without. I wondered if Vargas and Voigt had filled in enough of the blanks in the staging with sheer charisma, or if, like Bowers and Brown, they were left somewhat adrift.

This, too, frustrated, since when Deflo did actually do some in-depth blocking, the results were terrific, as in Act III, when Renato, convinced that Amelia has been unfaithful to him with Riccardo, forces her to draw the name of Riccardo’s future assassin out of the urn: the way the conspirators Renato, Samuel and Tom subtly but inexorably boxed in Amelia’s geometric space was marvelous, laying bare Amelia’s tragic weakness, her penchant for indecision followed by a lamenting of fate. But elsewhere, for example, Amelia seemed to be merely stalling rather than congenitally paralyzed to action. (It’s a theatrical paradox that such an indecisive character needs really decisive staging.)

Renato Palumbo conducted, drawing an absolutely gorgeous sound from the orchestra — textured and beautifully balanced, the winds and strings with delicious French point, the brass polished and smooth — but, at the same time, running a bit roughshod over the singers. His conducting of the chorus was most noticeably too casual, as the separation between singers and pit at times reached almost a half beat. The American soprano Anna Christy was a fine, bubbly, bratty Oscar — she played the page as quite young, say 9 or 10, and pulled it off — and her Act I “Volte la terrea” was all the more creditable since Palumbo never seemed inclined to let her breathe. Bowers and Brown weren’t as obviously disadvantaged, but throughout, they seemed hesitant to stretch phrases or spread on a little rubato, perhaps unsure whether Palumbo would indulge them. It left their singing less stylish than it might have been, as both showed some lovely moments. Though sometimes muscled, Brown’s big, rich voice was equal to the Verdi idiom, able to fill the hall, but also pared down to a nice float for some high, soft passages. Like Brown, Bowers took a scene or two to really warm up, but once there, he was also vocally solid, and occasionally even truly, Italianately ardent. As the joined-at-the-hip villains Sam and Tom, Mischa Schelomianski and Scott Wilde were compulsively watchable, making the crucial shift from thuggish menace to mean-spirited delight that makes the end of Act II — the pair chuckling away as Renato seethes at his wife’s seeming betrayal –one of Verdi’s most devastatingly effective ironic juxtapositions of light and dark.

Elena Manistina’s Ulrica was one of the evening’s highlights, a real Verdian alto, with dark power and a steely top. But even better was a late substitution, the French baritone Ludovic Tézier stepping in as Renato. Ringing throughout his range, Tézier’s phrasing displayed shape and momentum, and his stage presence had a kind of efficient confidence that drew energy towards him. (Tellingly, he was the most firm in his attempts to wrest the initiative from Palumbo’s baton.) Tézier was new to me, and I was glad to make the acquaintance.

Even with his flair, though, Tézier couldn’t quite cut through the production’s insistent abstraction; Renato’s stabbing of his former best friend Riccardo should be a wrenching turnabout, but the chemistry between all the characters was so dilute that Renato seemed more momentarily shocked by his own violence than permanently scarred by his betrayal. At times, Deflo seemed to be trying to shoehorn the opera into a dramatic pattern of individuals vs. structures of power — as if he was wishing he was directing “Don Carlos” or “Simon Boccanegra” instead. But “Ballo” is both less and more than those other Verdian monuments, a close-up on human melodrama more than a wide-angle view of human society. This production was perpetually at a conceptual distance, when the masks ought to fall right at our feet.

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PARIS-Music, especially classical music, is perhaps unrivaled in simultaneously evoking a specific time, slipping its historical moorings, and also existing in an insistent present. Such paradoxes were on ample display in Paris on Tuesday, for the final installment of an ingenious three-concert mini-festival comparing the 18th-century composer Jean-Phillippe Rameau and his 20th-century counterpart Gérard Grisey. The concert also illustrated the luxury of the French state-supported musical bureaucracy: the early-music group Le Concert Français (directed by Pierre Hantaï) played Rameau, while the Grisey was handled by the venerable Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by their director, Susanna Mälkki.

The postulated connection between the two composers was sound: Rameau’s pioneering tonal theories building on acoustical discoveries by Joseph Saveur; Grisey, a founder of the French “spectral” school, reacting to serialism by reexamining the very nature of musical substance. In such a context, Rameau’s overture to his 1748 “pastorale héroïque” “Zaïs” sounds awfully modern indeed, a stop-and-go drum tattoo giving hesitant birth to luminous triads that soon begin to shift and surprise, a seemingly endless arpeggiation of a diminished-seventh chord that ramps up the drama with avant-garde provocation. A set of airs and dances from “Hippolyte et Aricie”—their sheer number a testament to Rameau’s prolific felicity—were more subtle, the harmonies in a hierarchy of balance, tonal instabilities in gentle sway with temporal rhythm, the two catching each other at the ends of phrases.

Hantaï is a wildly entertaining conductor, less concerned with showing the beat than shaping the music’s demeanor; with a deadpan repertoire of gestures, equal parts ballet and pantomime, he might be as close to a Danny Kaye impression of a conductor as one is likely to find in the genuine article. Whatever he’s doing works: the group was consistently lively in the literal sense, lithe, flexible, with an appealingly rich sonic texture.

Grisey’s half of the concert exhibited two major works from the 1970s, “Partiels” and “Modulations” (which form half of the larger cycle “Les Espaces acoustiques”). The titles hint at the technique: Grisey electronically analyzed individual sounds, breaking them down into their constituent parts, which then became the elements for each piece’s vocabulary, individual sonic pixels isolated or amplified. The juxtaposition was enough to make the connection with Rameau convincing—the opening of “Partiels,” a thudding bass surmounted by increasingly harsh overtones, might be a Rameau fanfare as seen through an electron microscope. But Grisey is also fascinated by the practice of music, the physicality of music-making. Grisey includes an accordionist among his 18 musicians; the sonic subtlety of the instrument’s push-pull transfers to a microtonal respiration in the winds. That biological cycle becomes part of the work’s surreal-comic ending: the music decays into a rasping counterpoint of breath sounds, key clicks, and page rustling. The sound of the conductor ostentatiously wiping her brow with a handkerchief is added to the mix; in the final bar, a spotlight focuses on a percussionist, raising his cymbals for a mighty crash that never comes. The unexpectedly theatrical denouement is the human element in even the most rarified analysis-the Curies in love.

The cymbal crash does finally come (spotlight and all) at the end of “Modulations,” which is both simpler and more forbiddingly dense than “Partiels”: though the trajectory is clearer—the gradual decomposition of a single sound (the double bass’s low E) and its reassembly into a triumphantly bright, high-overtone apotheosis—the musical surface is constantly shifting and churning. Grisey ups his ensemble to 33, the better to shuffle and re-divide. In Baroque terms, if “Partiels” evokes a suite, a glittering chain of, say, airs and dances, “Modulations” is the grander, more imposing edifice of a passacaille, the ground-bass a rabbit-hole exploration of one note.

Grisey’s music, especially these sorts of seminal large-ensemble works, don’t get much play in the United States, being somewhat too big for new-music chamber groups and somewhat too complex for American orchestral rehearsal schedules. But the combination of state munificence and institutional memory makes the Ensemble Intercontemporain an ideal interpreter, with mettle and comfort in the style. Conducting this music is, by necessity, more a matter of being a traffic cop than an auteur, but Mälkki showed how it’s done, efficiently clear and calmly grounded, transmitting a confidence in the players’ ability to color within the lines.

Incidentally, the seats at the Salle des Concerts are some of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in anywhere. Boston venues are going to seem that much more Calvinist when I get back.

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We can blame the German Romantics for the fact that calling a composer disciplined refers less to his or her punctilious work habits and more to the resulting music’s efficient exploitation of thematic material—the idea of “organic unity” that made the jump from literary to music criticism in the 19th century. Which means that, by extension, we can also blame them for the obscurity of the composer and virtuoso pianist Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838), mostly remembered for being a student and colleague of Beethoven. Ries was hardly a dabbler: he composed prolifically, with enough sense of large-scale form to creatively tinker with it. But, in Romantic terms, Ries is what Beethoven would have been if he had no discipline. And if he were Liberace. In other words, this stuff is over-the-top fun.

Ries is the word.

The latest in an ongoing Naxos series of recordings surveying Reis’s pieces for piano and orchestra brings a trio of works from his 11-year sojourn in London, where he divided his time between dazzling audiences with his technique and promoting Beethoven’s latest imports. The Piano Concerto no. 7 (subtitled “Farewell to London”) echoes Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto or the “Choral Fantasy” in its profusion of runs and ornamentation, but pushes the envelope more than Beethoven ever would. The finale, for instance, opens with a promising, rustic Rondo theme, but before the first phrase is even over, Ries is already subjecting the tune to dense arabesques, including a dashing scale in thirds that makes the actual contour of the theme pretty much moot. But his bag of virtuoso tricks is seemingly bottomless: new ideas pour forth in such glittering profusion that, as soon as one gets over the lack of music-appreciation mile markers, the ride turns out to be consistently diverting.

The concerto comes accompanied by two variation sets. The Introduction et Variations Brillantes, Op. 170, weaves its theme (the English folksong “Soldier, Soldier, Will You Marry Me?”) into elegantly garrulous embroideries. But it’s trumped by the Grand Variations on “Rule, Britannia”—after a meandering introduction that would do Erroll Garner proud, Ries alternates thumping grandeur with an almost archly playful lyricism that, from the other historical side of the British Empire, sounds both wry and sincere.

Christopher Hinterhuber handles Ries’s pianistic parkour with energetic clarity and a bright, glinting tone; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Uwe Groll—who seems to love recording under-the-radar Classical/early Romantic repertoire—see Hinterhuber’s steel with a spacious dignity, almost a sense of ceremony. It’s a good match for Ries, whose music is always both well-appointed and bursting at the seams.

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So on Saturday, the last concert of the season for the BSO, when seven rows of choristers took the stage for Berlioz’s Te Deum, the anticipation was that of re-entering familiar territory. For this entry in the franchise, the BSO engaged quite probably the greatest Berlioz conductor of our time, Sir Colin Davis. At 81, Davis still brings the same casual grandeur to Berlioz’s music as  in his famous recordings of the 60s and 70s: expansive pace, warm sound, efficient gestures. Big climaxes—and few can make a climax as big as Berlioz—didn’t so much hit as bloom, a sudden influx of heat.

The Te Deum doesn’t have a whole lot of memorable tunes, but that’s not really the point of the piece. In fact, I think the Te Deum, more than any other of his works, sums up what it is about Berlioz that satisfies his fans and infuriates his detractors, and why the twain can never seem to meet. Within what should be the most predictable of genres—grand, ceremonial sacred music—Berlioz’s completely individual dialects of counterpoint and harmony mean that, in practice, you rarely have any real idea where he’s going. (Always composing in the heat of inspiration, he came as close as anyone to improvising with a full orchestra.) Berlioz collapses safe distance between the conventions of classical music and his own obsessive, enthusiastic, infuriating, Napoleonic personality. Any attempt to comfortably revel in the music’s magnitude is constantly redirected into Berlioz’s mercurial present. Is that addictively thrilling or hopelessly annoying? How you answer determines your relation to the Berlioz divide.

Davis’s success with Berlioz stems in no small part from his unfussy approach to the composer’s more outlandish inspirations. The chordal posturing between orchestra and organ that open the piece was conducted with minimal tosses of the wrist, the music left to stand as either ominous or comical on its own. The opulently long sibilance from the Tanglewood Festival Chorus on the word “Sanctus” seemed a mannered touch until the reprise, when the consonant is echoed with the fulsome swish of five—five—pairs of crash cymbals. The chorus was in fine voice throughout (though sometimes prone to race through Davis’s generous beat). In passages for children’s chorus (added after Berlioz heard a 6000-voice choir at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London—Berlioz must have thought he was dreaming), the PALS Children’s Chorus sacrificed some wholesome timbre for volume, though any 35 kids that can cut through the BSO is clearly a group to be reckoned with.

Tenor Matthew Polenzani exhibited some superb singing in “Te ergo quaesumus,” secure, elegant, and with a burnished core that seems to have become more prominent since I heard him last. The orchestra was in their institutional comfort zone—soft passages had a three-dimensional intricacy; loud passages were wonderfully loud.

The concert opened with Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 25 (K. 503), with pianist Imogen Cooper. The concerto is more interesting than exciting; the opening movement is saturated with a four-note rhythmic motive (three shorts and a long), that, translated into the C-major tonality and Mozart’s genial sound world, sounds for all the world like Beethoven’s 5th on Zoloft. Cooper, similarly, played with the clear exemplary diction and even-keel emotion of a certain kind of Shakesperean acting, although she upped the temperature enough in the finale to elicit a standing ovation. Overall, the performance tended towards declamatory gravity, as if to preview the Berlioz. But Mozart’s well-adjusted equanimity was drowned out by Berlioz’s spur-of-the-moment fervor, his madness the divinest sense.

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