When Christian Tetzlaff played a sliver of a Bach suite as an encore after his deeply thoughtful performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto, he was incarnating the invisible spirit hovering over the entire evening. Ingo Metzmacher and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin like to teach their audiences a thing or two, as their rigorously themed concert seasons in Berlin reveal. At Edinburgh, what they had to tell us was that Brahms, Berg and Webern all paid moving homage to Bach, and to that sense of change and the unchanging deep within his music.

The title of the evening’s first piece gave the game away. Webern’s Passacaglia shows the composer staking his claim, early in his career, to that structure of variations on an unchanging theme in which Bach gloried. Metzmacher drew out Webern’s sense of wonder as well as his heady celebration of the form, which was to come full circle in the final work of the evening, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

In between came Berg’s supreme tribute to Bach in his Violin Concerto. Tetzlaff left us with the feeling that Berg’s final variations on Bach’s chorale Es ist genug brought an uneasy peace to Berg’s own anguish for lost love and lost life. He had played the concerto’s third movement — supposedly a picture of the illness that destroyed the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius — as though the music were racking his own body. And Metzmacher bared the raw nerves of the score’s refracted patterns of memory.

The Brahms Fourth was one of the finest performances I’ve heard in some time. As though prepared and inspired by what had gone before, the orchestra played with a highly charged sense of unity. Metzmacher allowed them no expressive overflow. Rather, as though glorying in Brahms’s celebration of Bach, he worked the contrapuntal muscle of the music hard, re-energising the inner voices, and building and sustaining levels of intensity that were compelling.

The concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sep 21