The Boston Symphony Orchestra not only made a rare venture into the worlds of mixed media and multiculturalism last week, it also presented a work by (I think) only its third Oscar-winning composer (can’t guess the others? — see below). Originally commissioned for the BSO’s centennial season (2000-2001), Tan Dun’s 45-minute Concerto for Cello, Video, and Orchestra, The Map, starring Yo-Yo Ma, finally got its world premiere. The audience included many younger listeners — spiked hair and piercings are a rare sight at BSO events — and they seemed to enjoy it. And I suppose that’s a good thing, though I wonder how many of these young people will be back for this season’s other BSO commissions: Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, John Harbison’s Requiem, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s new piece, let alone Mozart or Stravinsky.

The Map has a touching story behind it. In 1981, when he was still a conservatory student in Beijing, on a visit to his home province of Hunan, Tan heard an amazing stone drummer — a village shaman who made music by hitting and rubbing stones together. With his BSO commission in hand, Tan returned to that village 20 years later, but the villagers informed him that "the tea was cold" — the drummer had died. The Map wants to elegize the drummer, Tan’s memory of a lost art, the music of China’s "aboriginal and minority villages," and Tan’s own "roots."

But Tan’s Oscar-winning film soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (also with Yo-Yo Ma) is more effective than his concert music. The Map amounts to an inflated orchestral accompaniment to 10 excerpts (more like a suite than a concerto) from films of Chinese folk musicians Tan made with video and sound artist Davey Frankel — which are projected by Frankel as part of the performance. The films themselves are not of high quality. Some of them are rather corny — charming, but condescending, National Geographic fashion, to the pretty young girls who make "tongue music," or the village "ghost dancer" (whose feet the camera ignores). Does the section picturing professional mourners keening and swaying together cross the line into exploiting private grief for public display?

The folk music is certainly fascinating. The segment where two men "argue" with each other with their rhythmically complex and increasingly rapid cymbals was quite thrilling. They hardly needed a battery of BSO percussionists — good as those BSO players were — to flesh out their accomplishment. The stone-drumming was also impressive (we don’t see his face, but it’s actually Tan himself tapping and rubbing the stones — he calls it "rock and roll"). Did we really need to see it from four different angles on a movie screen and three TV monitors? Did we need to see the stones suddenly move by themselves? These arty visuals looked film-schoolishly amateur, hardly on the same level of sophistication as Crouching Tiger, let alone National Geographic.

Yo-Yo Ma was, of course, indispensable. And Tan gave him a lot to do. His imitations of the funeral keening, his long-distance "duet" with a young singer ("In her moments of silence," Tan writes, "I was already composing the cello’s response"), his extension of the melody made by the man blowing into a single leaf, his bird chirpings, insect buzzings and chitterings, his sighing, soughing, and sawing were all spectacular. Ma is a one-man orchestra. The Map might be a better piece for solo cello.

The most eloquent parts of Tan’s music are his imitations of folk melodies. The more he deviates into Western concert-style music, the less memorable or individual the music gets. Will the real Tan Dun please stand up? The big cello tune sounded dangerously close to the sentimental violin theme from Schindler’s List. One "movement" is actually orchestral accompaniment to his own program note projected on the big screen. The last movement is loud and fast and ends with the Hunan equivalent of a sis-boom-bah shout — it rouses the audience but is too abrupt, too willed, to be a convincing summation.

Tan conducted — or rather coordinated — from the podium, with his own monitor in front of him. The orchestral playing was thoroughly accomplished, from Ann Hobson Pilot’s ubiquitous harp to John Ferillo’s oboe to the clarinet playing, the trombones, down the line to all those percussionists. Surely more rehearsal time went into this highly publicized piece than into the other works on the program, all led by Tan but riddled with wrong entrances and sloppy ensemble work. As a musical traffic director, Tan Dun is no Seiji Ozawa.

The first half of the concert was, however, expertly put together to provide a context for The Map. Shostakovich’s Overture on Russian and Kirghiz Folk Themes isn’t a masterpiece, but it was lively, unfamiliar, and a pointed introduction to a program concentrating so heavily on Asian ethnicity. The dark textures mixed authenticity and Hollywood "Orientalism" for eight colorful minutes. Flutist Fenwick Smith deserved his solo bow.

John Cage’s first orchestral piece, The Seasons, was a surprise — a captivating pastoral he composed for a Merce Cunningham ballet in 1947. Tan seemed to get the tone right — its Impressionistic pointillism, its Chinese (I Ching — also important in The Map) and Indian influences. It was so pretty, I wouldn’t have guessed that Cage was the composer.

Both the Cage and the Shostakovich were BSO debuts. But the third piece, another centering on natural phenomena, was old BSO territory: the Four Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, an opera commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and given its American premiere at Tanglewood in 1946, under Leonard Bernstein (Koussevitzky led the first BSO performances of the Interludes even before the American premiere of the opera). Tan caught the dreamy quality of "Dawn" and the syncopated energy of "Sunday Morning," with its chiming church bells. But "Moonlight" and "Storm" were ill-prepared and unfocused. Britten’s composition is so tight, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to follow it with Tan’s meandering nostalgia.

FYI: The other two Oscar-winning BSO composers are John Williams and AndrŽ Previn.

THIS PAST WEEKEND, Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic also gave us Britten and Shostakovich. The Four Sea Interludes are more usually than not performed with another orchestral passage from Peter Grimes — a roiling Passacaglia depicting the psychological turmoil of Britten’s doomed fisherman. Zander said in his pre-concert talk that he had in mind a program about "the individual in conflict with society." Starting from violist Stephen King’s eloquent solo, the Britten built inexorably to the point of the misunderstood outcast Grimes’s madness.

The program ended with a stunning performance of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, the work he began shortly after the death of Stalin, who’d declared the composer an enemy of society. And the kind of dramatic shaping Zander gave the seven-minute Passacaglia he also gave the 50-minute symphony.

Maybe it takes a Mahler conductor to know how to pace Shostakovich’s extended orchestral works. The Tenth actually quotes a passage from the Urlicht of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2: "Man is in the greatest need. Man is in the greatest pain." Of course, clarinettist Thomas Hill played this with great poignance — because he’s played in Zander’s Mahler. Zander and Hill made it an event. And the long first movement was a series of such events. Kathleen Boyd’s flute had another Mahlerian moment, playing Shostakovich’s Viennese waltz-gone-nightmare.

With most conductors the crashing climax in this movement comes too early; the symphony screams at you, badgers you. Zander paced the movement perfectly. Shostakovich needs restraint more than overstatement — it’s already overemphatic enough, but the material is not as rich or as complex as Mahler’s. Zander found just the right temperature. I’ve never heard this movement work better.

Or the whole symphony. Zander took both the short second movement (possibly a ferociously satirical portrait of Stalin) and the finale at the exhilarating but "impossible" speed Shostakovich requests. Turns out it’s not impossible. And it’s breathtaking. The Scherzo, with some magnificent horn playing (it’s got 11 horn calls), suggested another Mahlerian contrast — the pull between the Earthly and the Beyond (those outer-spacy last bars). And in oboist Peggy Pearson’s great solo during the slow introduction to the last movement, all the conflicting emotions in the symphony (anger, pain, lament, forgiveness) came together and so made a resolution possible — a resolution in the insistent repetition of the musical notes that in their German names spell out Dmitri Shostakovich’s (German) initials (DSCH), an assertion of ego that’s both moving and offputting.

In between the Dionysian intensities of the Britten and Shostakovich, Zander offered a kind of Apollonian mediation, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with its short slow middle movement in which peace, the power of music, subdues the forces of aggression. Liszt is said to have compared it to Orpheus calming the wild beasts; Zander compared it to Saddam Hussein handing over his powers to Gandhi. He got the orchestra to play with plenty of "attitude" — implacable in contrast to pianist John O’Conor’s touching tenderness.

I’ve always admired O’Conor’s playing, and it was good to have him back in Boston. He makes a lovely, sometimes even radiant sound. And he clearly understands the music. The teasing exchanges between the keyboard and the orchestra in the finale were a particular delight. But in the first movement, some of the runs didn’t "sound" consistently, and technical slip-ups are hard to get away with in this concerto. As has often been my experience with O’Conor, he’s good enough to make me want even more, but that extra leap from the excellent into the profound rarely occurs. We should be grateful for the excellence, yet we come so close to something so much better that its absence is frustrating. Still, the entire concert, with the orchestra at its very best and some remarkably timely issues — was profoundly satisfying.