Though the latest concert in Traced Overhead, the Barbican's Thomas Adès celebration, was the only one in the series not to include any of the composer's own music, it nevertheless bore his imprint in every detail. Adès had devised the programme for his recital with tenor Ian Bostridge with prodigious care, and the result was a musical sequence full of teasing interconnections, all superbly presented. The poetry of Hölderlin was one of the main connecting threads. Bostridge began with the Six Hölderlin Fragments, in many ways the most elusive and spare of all Britten's song cycles, deftly hinting at the emotions that seem to churn beneath the music's impacted surfaces, and ended the first half with Gyorgy Kurtag's Friedrich Hölderlin: An ... (Ein Fragment), Op 29. It's a typically aphoristic setting from 1989 of a fragmentary text, and a residue of Kurtag's abandoned plans to compose an opera about the German poet. After the interval, in Schumann's Dichterliebe, the focus switched to another German romantic poet, Heine. Bostridge treated the cycle less intensely than some interpreters, preserving a certain element of detachment. Adès made the most of the piano postludes that are so vital to many of these settings, and the way in which he led the cycle into silence after the final song was masterly. On a different scale altogether, though, were his startling Liszt performances - a bold, implacable Funérailles, that hardly dared to be consolatory - and the transcription of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, bathing the vocal line with wave upon wave of aqueous figuration.