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FULLY STAGED VERDI productions of anything other than his most popular operas have been rare in Boston. So Verdi lovers should be grateful to Opera Boston for its latest venture, Luisa Miller, two operas away from the big turning point in Verdi’s career of Rigoletto, La traviata, and Il trovatore. The plot, like that of a couple of earlier operas and the later masterpiece Don Carlo, comes from a play by Schiller. Kabale und Liebe ("Intrigue and Love") tells the story of an aristocrat who deceives the humble daughter of a retired soldier by hiding his rank, though he still wants to marry her even after his deception is revealed. The ending is tragic, thanks mainly to a worm named Wurm (one of my favorite names in opera, along with Nadir in Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles).

It’s hard to get a good Verdi cast these days — he requires heavier voices than Mozart yet a more flexible style of singing (bel canto) than Puccini. Opera Boston has done well. Young soprano Barbara Quintiliani, a New England Conservatory graduate from Quincy, has a gleaming tone, dramatic high notes, sweetly lyrical soft notes, impressive agility, and an appealing if elementary earnestness. Not everything fell into place on opening night — her breath control was a little chancy, so there was occasional unsteadiness, and (like almost everyone else) she sang mostly too loud, pushing her voice out of its central security and beauty. Verdi doesn’t have to be shouted. More on-stage experience for Quintiliani ought to solve most of these problems. I can’t imagine anyone not eager to hear her again.

Baritone Robert Honeysucker is a more polished artist, and as Miller he gave the most accomplished performance, though even he pushed his ringing voice into overdrive. The refined Armenian tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan didn’t force, and he delivered with eloquent finesse the opera’s most famous aria, Rodolfo’s "Quando le sere al placido" — a nostalgic evocation of happier times (and an ancestor of Cavaradossi’s outpouring in Tosca, "E lucevan le stelle").

Sturdy rather than elegant support came from veteran bass Zelotes Edmund Toliver (a professor of voice at BU after a long career in Europe) as Count Walther, Rodolfo’s father; bass Daniel Cole (still a graduate student but making the rounds in regional opera) as Wurm; and mezzo-soprano Gigi Mitchell Velasco, whose entire performance, as the proud duchess Count Walther tries to force Rodolfo to marry, was revved up several notches too many.

Chorus and orchestra were excellent, and Opera Boston’s music director, Gil Rose, proved himself a superb Verdian, thinking out both the subtle details of small phrases and the sweep of entire scenes. Eric Levenson’s economical design — small set pieces and a few pieces of furniture against a black background — worked beautifully with Christopher Ostrom’s dramatic Caravaggio-esque lighting and Gail Astrid Buckley’s costumes (vivid for everyone except Quintiliani). Stage director Jay Lesenger, artistic director of the Chautauqua Opera, seemed to throw up his hands about what to do with the plot’s melodrama. Mainly characters just stood, knelt, or fell. The long final duet between Luisa and Rodolfo seemed static in its lack of visual tension between the dying lovers. Nothing helped establish or reveal relationships. Duets had singers at opposite ends of the stage looking away from one another. Lesenger even had Wurm put his feet up on the Count’s desk. No wonder the Count eventually stabbed him.

BENJAMIN ZANDER and the Boston Philharmonic ended their season-long "Mahler Journey" with Mahler’s least-loved symphony, the enigmatic Seventh, in an energetic performance that mostly disappointed me. It’s actually one of my own favorites — a work I love from the old Otto Klemperer recording and from a stunning, insinuating rendition by Sir Simon Rattle with the BSO in 1991. The Seventh might be the least stable of Mahler’s major symphonic works. Its long first movement revolves around marches; the last movement is an exuberant celebration, with echoes of the Overture to Wagner’s late comedy, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and the tingling of the Overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart’s Turkish farce about rescuing the heroine from a harem, with bells peeling from every corner of the stage. In between come three haunting movements of "Night Music" — mysterious military drills (did Mahler have Rembrandt’s so-called Night Watch in mind?) and romantic serenades (with mandolin and guitar) surrounding a shadowy, "spectral" Scherzo that ought to give every listener the creeps.

My major problem with Zander’s performance was that everything sounded a little too much the same, and from the very first movement, even in solo passages, mostly too loud. How can a movement be "shadowy" at high volume levels? Not only was I not hearing the kind of nuanced playing Zander over the years has taught me to expect, I wasn’t hearing — in the playing itself — much emotion at all. For a few bars near the beginning of the second Night Music, the violins sounded not just loud or soft, fast or slow, but quite tender. But that tenderness soon dissolved. Even the mandolin and guitar were more noty than seductive. When I looked at the orchestra, the only time I saw expressions that conveyed personal involvement were the smiles that surfaced in the Rondo-Finale.

Sunday at Sanders Theatre, the audience erupted after the Finale. But then Zander announced, "We’re ending something else than just a concert today." This season would close not with celebration but with an image of Mahler "taking leave of the extraordinary struggles and triumphs of everyday life." He introduced mezzo-soprano Jane Struss, who "has been on the lifelong Mahler journey of this orchestra." Struss sang Kindertotenlieder with Zander the first time he ever played Mahler, 30 years ago, and she’s joined forces with him in every Mahler vocal work he’s led.

So after the resounding din of the Seventh, Zander led Struss and the orchestra in the quietest version imaginable of Mahler’s quietest, most inward song: "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have become lost to the world"), a song of withdrawal into the silence of the spirit, intimate affection, and the creation of art. Except for a violin solo that overpowered a couple of words, the orchestra — harp and oboe (Martha Moor and Peggy Pearson, who played in that first Kindertotenlieder) and plangent English horn (Ronald Kaye, in the most beautiful playing of the concert) — contributed to the remarkable indrawing of Struss’s singing. "Ruh" ("rest"), "stillen" ("silent"), and "allein" ("alone") are the key words of Friedrich Rückert’s moving poem. Her ascent on the word "Himmel" ("heaven") was perhaps the single most moving stop on the entire Mahler journey.

I was excited at the prospect of this Philharmonic Mahler season from my favorite Mahler conductor. But now I wonder whether Zander hasn’t been playing too much Mahler. And he still can’t let go. He opens the Philharmonic’s next season with two of Mahler’s last works, the Adagio from his unfinished Symphony No. 10 and the soul-searching song symphony Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"). I hope he returns renewed and open to all sorts of fresh possibilities.

MEANWHILE, AT SYMPHONY HALL, substituting at the last minute for the controversial but ailing Daniele Gatti, Indonesian-born Chinese conductor Jahja Ling, director of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Festival, who’s conducted the BSO only once before, in 1985, stepped in to do a smart, intricately detailed, clearly worked-out, and (except for some very rough spots in the brasses) wonderfully played Mahler First Symphony. Most impressive was the way Ling steadily built from the opening tentative, leisurely chirpings of nature toward one overwhelming infernal climax at the end. Interrupting the satirical third movement, the strains of the concluding song from Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen had the loving tenderness I missed in much of Zander’s Seventh, and the last-movement recapitulation of earlier themes (similar to what Beethoven does in his Ninth Symphony) really felt like our past life passing before us. I’m not much in the mood for happy endings these days, but this one seemed earned.

Earlier, Ling seemed less helpful in accompanying the imaginative and poignant playing of Mozart’s loveliest piano concerto, No. 23 in A, by young Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli. It’s so rare these days for anyone to play Mozart with any feeling at all, I can forgive Cascioli a certain over-delicacy. His slow movement was both dreamy and searching, and as his fingers skipped along the rippling keyboard, the last movement had a wonderful spirit of freedom and fun.