There wasn't quite enough time to explore such nuances, though: this was only half a concert, in spirit and in length.
Perhaps he will fare better on Saturday evening, when he performs the work without having conducted half a concert first.
"It's really a great opportunity," Costello said, "but I'm faced with the same conundrum Ben has, of playing what amounts to half a concert.
But the concert's first half, a perfect concert in itself, was as affecting as any jazz I've seen this year.
The 56-year-old started to feel unwell during the first half of a concert with his orchestra, the world-beating Berlin Philharmonic, at their stunning Philharmonie concert hall.
If that was more than an auspicious first half for a concert of ostensibly modern music, it just about got better in the second half: HK Gruber's own Trumpet Concerto Aerial is a fiendishly difficult hoot that I remember from a recording of it coming out on Deutsche Grammophon's since deleted 20/21 line, back when I was hocking records at Tower.
Between now and Christmas, I have tickets for half-a-dozen concerts.
In April, it was one of half a dozen concert grand pianos shipped to the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich.
In 1904 the composer Vincent d'Indy produced an edition in French, which comprised only Act 2, a shortened Act 3 and Act 4. This edition was the basis of the first public performance of the work in two-and-a-half centuries, a concert performance at d'Indy's Schola Cantorum on 25 February 1904.
The assassin, Trigger, was partly based on Amaryllis Fleming, Ian's half-sister, a concert cellist with blonde hair, and Fleming managed to get a passing reference to her in the story, saying: "Of course Suggia had managed to look elegant, as did that girl Amaryllis somebody".
It is designed for certain minutes of magic: when the opera lets out on a winter's night and snowflakes mingle with the fountain's illuminated spray, or when, in the half hour before a concert starts, crowds swarm like moths toward the luminous box of Avery Fisher Hall.
