Thanks to 100-year-old composer Elliott Carter, one of the best moments of the Dec. 4 Boston Symphony Orchestra concert occurred when no instruments were being played. After the conclusion of BSO's world premiere of Carter's Interventions, the composer himself took the stage, a bit feebly, with the aid of conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and BSO conductor James Levine. He turned to the orchestra and the audience, grinning at their appreciation of his birthday present to himself just days before his centenary.

Carter, who will turn 100 this Thursday, has the same wit and flair that his youthful self first tossed into the music scene back when the establishment hadn't gotten over the shock of Arnold Schoenberg, and Carter was an iconoclastic Harvard student. Interventions is not a concerto that exchanges dominance between piano and orchestra, but an enormous discussion among solo piano (the great conductor/pianist Barenboim, for this premier), orchestra and two trios, complete with interruptions and agreements. The piece opened with a unison A in the orchestra, followed by a B-flat in piano, and moved through 15 minutes of music that was at once uniquely Carter and unusually melodic for his style. The winds twittered their own two cents into those uncharacteristically lyrical passages, and the piano often chimed in with, or sometimes overbore, the orchestra with the complex cascades of notes for which Carter is known. The piece ended loudly and brazenly, again an unusual touch for Carter, but as Barenboim and Levine stood up, acknowledged the applause and the orchestra and then brought Carter to the stage, it seemed somehow appropriate. Carter has been an iconoclast for 80 years. He has the right to show us just how brazen he can be.

Barenboim and Levine preceded Interventions with the Fantasy in F-minor for Four Hands by Schubert. The piece begins with a mysterious, melancholy melody that the piece brings back over and over, and each time the tune recurred, the two brought new inflections of emotion to it. They executed the complex fugal passage with simultaneous feeling and form and ended with a flash of energy that gave way to the opening melancholy. It was fabulous to hear the two musical giants play together, merging their styles into one piece of music. Barenboim continued this marathon of piano playing after intermission with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. The orchestra's accompaniment was wonderful and subtle, the players complementing the piano while showcasing their own capacities. The second movement was gorgeous and patient, and Barenboim and the BSO ended with a rollicking and astoundingly precise 6/8 passage.

As if this were not enough, the concert concluded with a performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the piece that literally caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. Audiences today are more accustomed to dissonance and nonconformity than those when Carter was a boy, but the piece is still an aural whirlwind. Richard Svoboda played the famous opening bassoon line slowly and expressively, somehow encompassing serenity and tension as his smooth rubato passage opened a piece that would take us through ritual dances and sacrifice. The Rite of Spring is a stunning piece that Levine and the BSO played to perfection. Though it ended a three-hour concert, the audience remained rapt through the final crashing chords of a night to remember.