Are we culturally dumbed down, too happy to be spoon-fed the easy option? On Tuesday evidence pointed the other way. The hall was full and buzzing. Audience concentration was intense, and woe betide a cougher. Yet on the stage stood no star gurgling pap. Instead, here were Thomas Adès and the excellent Scharoun Ensemble Berlin (a chamber offshoot of the Berlin Philharmonic), buckling down to more serious stuff in the Barbican’s compelling Adès series Traced Overhead .

Though not a star, it’s obvious that Adès has become a pied piper — a composer, pianist and conductor who can take an audience with him anywhere he wants. At first he took us to Beethoven, and the ghostliest performance of the Ghost piano trio. Even before the slow movement’s shivers, we’d become putty in the musicians’ hands, quivering over the teasing tension between piano and strings, dodging the bullets as the allegro ricocheted from abrupt fire to hushed hesitations. So that’s where the mercurial and jagged qualities in Adãs’s music come from: Beethoven!

Fascinating to jump from this Ghost to Adès’s single-span Piano Quintet, a work with its own 19th-century ghosts, structured as a cockeyed homage to classical sonata form. Or it might be a musical Rubik cube, with the obsessive juggling between two motifs — rising chords, a falling scale.

As usual the 20 minutes seemed a mite longer than necessary, thanks to the exposition section’s repeat. Yet through all the music’s glinting facets, the players’ clarity never wavered. Nor, after the interval, did clouds blanket the Court Studies from The Tempest , brilliant character miniatures from Adãs’s opera.

For the finale, another of Adès’s composing heroes, Mahler, took to the stage. Unfortunately, not for long: there are only four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen , and with Simon Keenlyside’s baritone we wanted at least eight. The second lure was the instrumental cushion, sensitively arranged by Andreas N. Tarkmann for five strings, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Which tugged the heart most: the lover’s cries, or the Scharouns’ bittersweet postludes? Very hard to say.

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