You have to love Pierre Boulez, even if his reputation tells you that he's distant and severe. Maybe years ago -- when he was the enfant terrible of contemporary classical music, and later the unpopular music director of the New York Philharmonic -- he might have been like that. But now, at age 75, he's wonderfully relaxed.
Backstage, after a concert he conducted at Carnegie Hall, he talked with grateful warmth to everyone who came to say hello to him. A few months later, when I spoke to him myself, he answered all my questions with courtesy and great good humor, holding back on only one subject, the emotions in his compositions, which he never said weren't there -- he just didn't think he should impose his view of them on anybody else.
After he gave stunning concerts not long ago with the London Symphony at Carnegie, he barely took his bows; instead, he directed all applause to the orchestra. After one of these performances, the Hall gave a party for him; the tributes offered at it touched him so deeply that he all but wept. The three London Symphony concerts that I heard (there were four in all) were revelations. They were part of a triple series called "Perspectives," which runs throughout the season and presents the pianist Maurizio Pollini and the conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim along with Mr. Boulez. At earlier installments, Mr. Boulez seemed more tentative; he made mistakes at an open rehearsal of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, with student musicians, and conducted Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 29 as if, improbably, every moment in the music was the same.

But at the London Symphony events, my heart leapt, most of the time, with simple joy. It's true that Mr. Barenboim brutalized the solo part in Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, turning a delicate work into an inappropriate display of muscle. But under Mr. Boulez, Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" (at the fourth concert) shimmered and danced, with clarity of such warmth that, to name it, we'd need a word the English language doesn't have, one that would suggest not just that all details are presented with the utmost transparency, but also that each has a texture, taste and vivid color of its own.
The need for such a word was most apparent when Mr. Boulez ended his third London Symphony concert with Mahler's Sixth Symphony. The work is huge and overwrought; Mr. Boulez, if we believed his reputation, would be distant, even icy; but by the end I was almost limp from awe, gratitude and sheer emotional exhaustion. Each moment in this work, as Mahler notates it, seems remarkably precise; Mr. Boulez made each sound unique, not just (let's say) a united front of horns and trumpets, but one inimitable sonic union, defining just a single instant in the piece. With unobtrusive, fluid gestures he shaped each phrase, lingering at certain high points with what looked like real affection. The slow third movement glowed with tenderness (something you can also hear in the third movement of Mr. Boulez's recently released Deutsche Grammophon recording of Mahler's Fourth with the Cleveland Orchestra, a performance otherwise not quite genial enough). Mr. Boulez is hardly unemotional; he just secludes his emotion deep inside his work, never using music, either his own or anybody else's, to flaunt his feelings.

These concerts also offered new compositions, one on each program, and they made me sad about Boulez's role in contemporary music. The three new works I heard -- by Salvatore Sciarrino, Olga Neuwirth and George Benjamin -- were unconvincing, the first and last not much more than trifles, though Mr. Benjamin's piece, "Palimpsest," did offer a delightfully wispy little woodwind chorale, often hiding in the background like a wistful duck you might discover in the corner of a busy illustration in a children's book.
Since Mr. Boulez, the loftiest of high modernists, conducted these pieces (and in effect was their sponsor, since this was his series at Carnegie Hall), they all must qualify, ipso facto, as advanced contemporary music. But only their musical language -- atonal, and generally avoiding steady rhythms -- made them seem advanced. Mr. Boulez, with his own, genuinely complex atonal style, really was advanced in the years just after World War II; but now he seems oddly conservative.
He told me that he doesn't care for tonal music being written now, because it's essentially nostalgia, nothing more than an expression of emotions remembered from the past. Emotions of today, he told me, can only be expressed "in the vocabulary of today." But which "today" are we talking about? The idea of a contemporary musical language -- in fact, the very notion of a mode of musical speech defined by its technical qualities, its syntax, by the combinations of notes it uses -- is rooted in the 1950s, in the age of high modernism. By the 1970s, a reaction had set in, and in our time tonal music has returned with implications Mr. Boulez might not understand.

Look, for instance, at Lincoln Center's extraordinary presentation this year of all the Shostakovich string quartets, played with enormous dedication -- if not with the raw urgency that Russian artists sometimes convey -- by the Emerson Quartet. These concerts helped define our current musical era, first because (as Jane Moss, Lincoln Center's vice president of programming pointed out at a press conference announcing Lincoln Center's 2000-2001 season) there's a new emphasis on repertoire, rather than performers -- not just the Emerson Quartet, in other words, but the Emerson playing a huge cycle of Shostakovich works that aren't nearly as well known as they should be. That's also true, as Ms. Moss generously pointed out, of Carnegie's "Perspectives," whose point is not just to feature Messrs. Boulez, Pollini and Barenboim, but to present them in modern music that they deeply care about.
The Shostakovich series most defined our era, though, because Shostakovich -- even though he died in 1975 and writes in what Mr. Boulez dismisses as a second- or even third-hand tonal language -- sounds more contemporary than Mr. Boulez does. That's because the true language of his music can't be analyzed in purely musical terms; it's body language, a discourse of subtexts, ironies and contradictions. Shostakovich, a nervous man, lived in Soviet Russia, and in Stalin's reign fell so far out of favor that he thought he might be shot. Later he was honored, but never, obviously, could say in public, or in his music, how much he hated living under communism.
That helps give his work the same ambiguity we hear in so much contemporary pop. Engulfed in popular culture, many pop musicians also hate it. And while obviously they're not forced to keep silent, as Shostakovich was, their music often sounds ambivalent, because pop culture's vast smothering weight -- at once benign and poisonous -- often leaves them not quite sure what they really feel. Contemporary culture thrives on ambiguities like that one, and so when Carnegie Hall labels parts of its "Perspectives" series as "contemporary music," the label isn't accurate. "Perspectives" offered postwar compositions with no current cultural referent, written in a language most younger composers never use; the series might more accurately have been called a retrospective, an examination of musical procedures that -- quite honorably -- belong mainly to the past.

Which isn't to blame Carnegie Hall for misrepresentation; it simply followed the general practice in the classical music world, where anything written in the last 50 years is labeled as "contemporary" because it stands apart from the older repertoire -- Beethoven, Brahms -- that the core of the classical music audience most wants to hear.
I'm grateful that Carnegie is offering programs that make me think. And certainly I'm not saying that I don't like Mr. Boulez's work; I love a lot of it. Maybe the "Structures" for two pianos (dating from 1955, the second half of which was played in a Weill Hall concert of Mr. Boulez's music) sounds severe and angular, but its severity is in itself arresting, and Mr. Boulez himself knows the piece has problems. In the '50s, as he told me, he built his own musical language, and because he did it with "ferocity," rigidly restricting what he wrote, something in the music that resulted was "very arid." But later, he went on to say, "I master more the technique, I can more dominate it to express myself."
Thus his pieces from the past two decades -- like "Anthemes II" and "Sur Incise," played at his Carnegie events, or "Répons" and "Dialogue de l'ombre double," recorded on a recent Deutsche Grammophon CD -- are supple and (in a way that somehow complements the intellectual apparatus holding them together) so beautiful they leave me speechless. Imagine living deep inside a glowing, complex sound, exploring every detail of it from within. These works reward imaginative listeners, and are so private that they transcend any musical philosophy or style. They embody all the reasons to love Pierre Boulez -- a man who seems to keep his own most loving feelings secret, bringing them alive only in the depths of his music.