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Not everything worked, just as not everything works in the opera. The composer-approved amplification interfered with diction and made the voices harsher and more distant — as if it were all on TV. The banquet scene looked as if it were taking place in a church basement, and the climactic glitter shower was unconvincing. In too many scenes, the music goes on after the dramatic points have been made. The scene of mutual misunderstandings between Nixon and Mao is a good idea that the merely serviceable music reduces to tedium. But Edmiston also rose to the best music. There was no way Opera Boston could have a plane land on stage, as Sellars did. But the use of a model airplane, borne aloft by a child circling the stage and casting large shadows (just one example of Christopher Ostrom’s inventive lighting), was unsettling — even more so when the toy plane reappeared near the end.

The last scene is Adams at his best. At the end of the long day, the major characters go to their separate rooms to reminisce, or re-evaluate. Edmiston abandoned the cots of the original production for a series of low stepstools that made the figures seem both more isolated and more connected (when Pat Nixon needed a handkerchief, Chou offered her his). The music is haunting, elegiac. Thomas Meglioranza’s Chou looked too young, but his plush voice and rapt concentration made his final pronouncements chilling. Goodman makes Chou sound like the oracular Robert Lowell of "Waking Early Sunday Morning":

At this hour nothing can be done.

Just before dawn the birds begin,

The warblers who prefer the dark,

The cage-birds answering. To work!

Outside this room the chill of grace

Lies heavy on the morning grass.

Superb too were Majie Zeller, Susan Forrester, and Glorivy Arroyo as Mao’s three secretaries and translators, and the chorus (at one point wearing Mao masks as they mouthed his ideas). Music director Gil Rose and the extraordinary players of his Boston Modern Orchestra Project kept Adams’s minimalist repetitions urgently intense yet also let the variegated colors of his orchestration and his seductive melismas shine through. Rose made the best case for Nixon in China as more than a period document, as a living work of art. We needed to see it here — not just on television. We should feel grateful to Opera Boston for having the guts to put it on and finding the best people to do it right.

IT’S FASCINATING to compare Nixon in China with the new film of Adams & Goodman’s The Death of Klinghoffer, whose first production was also directed by Peter Sellars and choreographed by Mark Morris and had Sanford Sylvan and James Maddalena in leading roles. Sylvan still plays Klinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound American tourist who is murdered by the Palestinian hijackers of the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro. PBS declined to air this new version, but it’s now available on DVD (Decca).

Adams cut 20 minutes of music (would that he’d do the same for Nixon), and he conducts the London Symphony with dramatic surge and lyrical grace. British director Penny Woodcock has done the opposite of Opera Boston’s making Nixon more abstract. She’s fleshed out Goodman’s abstract libretto with archival footage of the Holocaust and re-created scenes of the Jewish emigration and Israelis taking over a Palestinian village while giving faces, personal identities, to the anonymous members of the chorus.

It’s not that the opera takes no sides — it takes both sides, and neither side is forgiven. Or forgives. The final impasse, like much of the new footage, becomes unbearable. Adams’s most memorable music is in the opening choruses of Exiled Palestinians and Exiled Jews, which are as beautiful as Verdi’s famous chorus of exiles in Nabucco, "Va pensiero" (these are the choruses the BSO canceled after September 11). But much of the music doesn’t transcend the pain of the subject, as it does in the more ambiguous but less ambivalent Nixon. Is it art — is it good art — if it doesn’t achieve that transcendence?

SOME NIXON MUSICIANS were among those who, the same weekend, donated their services to a most enjoyable benefit for Emmanuel Music. It was an evening of Bach (who else?): two secular cantatas, including the remarkable Schleicht, spielende Wellen ("Glide, playful waves"), a royal tribute that takes the form of four rivers singing; and the heavenly reconstruction for oboe and violin of the great Two-Piano Concerto. The generous (in every sense of the word) soloists were Peggy Pearson (oboe) and Danielle Maddon (violin), sopranos Roberta Anderson and Kendra Colton, mezzo-soprano Krista River, tenors Frank Kelley and Ryan Turner, and basses David Kravitz and Donald Wilkinson. But as usual, it was the Emmanuel Chorus and Orchestra who were the real stars, all under the wise, vivid, sympathetic conducting of Craig Smith.

I FIRST MET VERA GOLD when she worked in the BSO press office. Later she moved to the Wang Center. I loved her because she was that rara avis, a PR person who always told you the truth. She had the idea of giving prizes to talented inner-city kids for their artwork and writing, and of starting an international exchange of student work. She put on poetry and fiction readings in the lower lobby of the Wang, and at a club on Lansdowne Street. She even started a new literary collaborative, 96 Inc, which soon had its own magazine. She was also a gifted actress (having worked at the Actors Studio alongside Marilyn Monroe) and playwright.

She died last week of leukemia, at the age of 64. She’ll be profoundly missed. But in the memories of everyone who had the good fortune to know her, she’ll remain a model of enlightened professionalism, kindness, supportiveness, honesty, and unstinting generosity.