When Gianluca Cascioli played the Beethoven First Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thanksgiving weekend, he inaugurated a local run of Beethoven piano concertos. There were three during the next two weeks, and each one had something vital to say.

The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, under principal guest conductor Gunther Schuller, presented Beethoven’s Third with Russell Sherman, one of the most "thinking" (or "re-thinking") and "feeling" pianists around, and the first American to record all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and concertos — following in the footsteps of the greatest 20th-century Beethoven pianist, Artur Schnabel, who became, in the 1930s, the very first pianist ever to record them all (Sherman’s new three-CD Beethoven-concerto box has just been released on GM, Gunther Schuller’s record label — see below).

The Third Concerto, a dramatic piece in C minor, was obviously inspired by Mozart’s heartbreaking Concerto in the same key (K.491, which Sherman will be playing with Emmanuel Music’s Craig Smith on January 12). But from the moment the piano enters, you know you’re dealing with a composer who is staking a claim to new musical territory.

Sherman’s entrance began as an earth-shaking rumble welling up from some deep terrestrial core and erupting like the sacred river in Coleridge’s contemporaneous "Kubla Khan" ("And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,/As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,/A mighty fountain momently was forced"). Immediately the pianist repeated the theme in his tenderest, most pained voice as he entered into dialogue with Schuller. His clear bright arpeggios seemed to lift right out of the orchestra. The cadenza became an Odyssey — heroic and rangy (was the pianist just passing through Hungary?), and searching. Sherman’s ultra-pianissimo trills practically glowed in the dark.

The middle movement — very slow, a real Largo — was more a hymn, a prayer, than an aria. Sherman ended the song on a single quiet note that triggered a rhythmic trip wire that sent him dancing, tentatively at first, then buoyantly, into the minor-key, sad-happy Rondo finale.

Sherman is famous for hearing melodic invention in the left-hand accompaniment. And in Schuller, he had a conductor who could swing the same quality with the orchestra. Schuller’s imaginatively balanced program began with two classical pieces, Mozart’s alternately busy and stealthy Figaro Overture preceding the Beethoven, and ended with two spiky and tuneful 20th-century dance classics: Stravinsky’s incomprehensibly neglected Danses concertantes (1942), which simultaneously tickles you with sharp fingernails and a feather boa, and Milhaud’s 1919 Le bœuf sur le toit ("Bull on the Roof" — the name of a Brazilian popular song), in which soupy salon music tries to interrupt a samba so infectious you can’t get it out of your head even after the piece is over. The orchestra got — and delivered — the joke of Milhaud’s piquant "out-of-tune" harmonies, though maybe Schuller overstated the understatement.

A few words on the Sherman recordings. Schuller has done the music world a great service in preserving these live performances presented by Monadnock Music last year. James Bolle is the sympathetic conductor, and the orchestra captures both the refinement and the grandeur of the music. But it’s Sherman’s party. It’s tempting to isolate memorable keyboard moments: the poignant slow-motion cascades in the opening movement of the First Concerto, or those amazing subtle transformations from shadowy doubt to sunlit illumination in the cadenza; the slow bel canto aria in the Second; that soulful Largo of the Third; the brief but profound Andante con moto of the Fourth, with the piano as Orpheus pleading with the implacable spirits of Hell for the release of Eurydice; the radiance of those shimmering, otherworldly high chords in the first movement of the Emperor, or its Adagio, reaching higher and higher, then drifting down in acceptance, or the enchanted transition to the tingling Finale.

But these performances are such enthralling and unified wholes, it’s a disservice to dwell on effects. Sherman and Bolle trace Beethoven’s stylistic adventure from "Enlightened" 18th-century Classicism to the uninhibited outpourings of a true Romantic, and his spiritual passage from musical explorer to soul-searching hero. As in all indispensable performances, there isn’t a moment that doesn’t carry meaning.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, pianist Judith Gordon played the C-minor Concerto with the Longwood Symphony Orchestra under Francisco Noya, Gordon’s fifth annual benefit concert for the Hospitality Program — a non-profit organization that provides housing for patients and families of patients who come to Boston for medical treatment. The Longwood Symphony is a group of gifted amateurs from the medical profession. And Gordon is a superb musician. But the Longwood couldn’t provide the partnership that the Pro Arte and Monadnock orchestras offered Sherman. The individual players make good sounds (except for the principal horn, who was not having a good day). But Noya had his hands full keeping them together, so there wasn’t much rhythmic life. Transitions, even from movement to movement, were clumsy to the point of near disaster. Gordon was at her best when she was left to herself, in the cadenzas and especially in the hymnodic rapture of the slow movement. Beethoven, we might have known, isn’t easy. At least Noya was able to galvanize the orchestra in the "harder" Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

THIS STRING OF CONCERTOS ended with the return to the BSO of Dubravka Tomsîc, the extraordinary Slovenian pianist who has won not only Boston’s heart but also, to his credit, Seiji Ozawa’s. In his abbreviated last season as BSO music director (he has only three Boston programs left, in April), his list of guest soloists includes only personal favorites — Peter Serkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Tomsîc.

The concerto was Beethoven’s most poetic and most daring — No. 4 in G, which opens with one of his most original strokes: instead of the usual orchestral introduction, there’s a quiet phrase for solo piano. Tomsîc gave a mysterious solemnity to the first chord, a calling to attention, an invitation to listen; she paused, then speeded up to round out the phrase, as if to say, no, no lingering, not here — not yet. Ozawa and the orchestra responded with a fuzzy lyricism bordering on the sentimental. The rest of the movement seemed a little unsettled. Tomsîc dazzled with her range of color, her glistening tone, the technical bravura of the trills and runs, the hushed intimacy of the quiet playing — though, uncharacteristically, she missed a few notes (the following afternoon, when I listened to the radio broadcast, she was flawless).

Nothing unsettled about the slow movement, though. This was one of the most affecting performances of this movement I’ve ever heard. Tomsîc seemed in a trance — so close to silence, to stasis, to the still point of the turning world, she seemed unaware of her surroundings. This Orpheus wasn’t pleading with the guardians of Hades; he was in a state of spiritual contemplation. There’s a sudden crisis — a series of rising trills, growing louder and louder, more and more terrified. Then arpeggios plunging into an abyss. The human tragedy has to be acknowledged. But there were no compromises. When the crisis passed, the "vivacious" rondo brought us back into a livable world.

The evening began with more Beethoven — a pallid, unintense Egmont Overture (nothing like the thrilling version Claudio Abbado offered as an encore to his Berlin Philharmonic concert in October) — and ended with one of Ozawa’s more convincing renderings of the most famous piece written for the BSO, Bartók’s ominous and comic Concerto for Orchestra, which was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky in 1943 (you can hear him conduct the first broadcast performance, December 30, 1944, a month after the world premiere, on the BSO’s new 12-CD box of archival radio broadcasts). Ozawa still conveys no sense of Bartók’s Hungarian ethnicity, but he elicited more dynamic variation than I’ve come to expect from him, and if there were passages that still needed polish, better that than the usual narrow mechanical perfection.

TWO RECENT VOCAL RECITALS were object lessons in how to — and how not to — put a program together. Cheers to mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove. Here was a faculty recital (she teaches at New England Conservatory) that was also thoughtful and ambitious, with premieres of two powerful song cycles by major Boston-based composers: the local premiere of John Harbison’s haunting (and sometimes comic) North and South, his setting of six elegant and urgent poems (mostly love poems — one still unpublished) by Elizabeth Bishop, and the world premiere of Andy Vores’s chilling Six Songs on Poems by Margaret Atwood, also "love" poems, but at times so desperately bleak the singer can only stutter the consonants.

Torgove and her game accompanist, Kayo Iwama, surrounded these with a set of Gershwin love songs, for which her newly expanded vocal power seemed almost too lavish, and an insinuating Kurt Weill set, which in its spectrum of approaches to love succeeded in tying the entire program together.

Three days later, the glamorous and glamorously gifted twentysomething Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian made her Boston debut in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, accompanied by no less a celebrity accompanist than the dexterous Martin Katz. The program was occasionally charming but mainly lightweight, and it didn’t hang together: six Spanish songs by Granados and three Debussy settings of Baudelaire, selected from longer cycles, and a spectacular Vivaldi motet; then, after intermission and a change of gown, five Tchaikovsky songs, and a batch of appealing Armenian folk songs — love songs and lullabies. Plus encores by Fernand Oubradous, Pauline Viardot (the famous 19th-century coloratura), and Samuel Barber. Bayrakdarian has brilliance and style and an exciting voice, but she doesn’t probe anything too deeply, and she didn’t give herself (or us) much meat to chew on.