Praise Hayes!

That's the story of Hayes the artist. But he also has a biography of vital cultural and social importance. He was born on the very plantation in Georgia where his mother had been a slave. His formal education ended with the sixth grade, but his talent got him admitted to Fisk University. On tour with the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1911, he decided to settle in Boston and study voice. Later, he studied in London with Sir George Henschel, the first conductor of the Boston Symphony. Professional management wouldn't touch a black classical performer, so he became his own concert promoter. He lost his life savings -- $200 -- giving a recital at Jordan Hall but won good reviews. In 1923, with Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony, he became the first black artist to appear with a major international orchestra.

Last week, the BSO and the city of Boston, in a major outreach effort, celebrated Hayes's artistry and his legacy. There were concerts all over town, including a weekend Hayes tribute by the BSO, with $5 tickets for the open rehearsal. AT&T, which co-sponsored the tribute, distributed to schools across the commonwealth a 20-minute videotape, "Who Is Roland Hayes?", prepared by WCVB-TV. At the pre-concert dinner, Judge Julian T. Houston, who is on the BSO board of trustees and who spearheaded the celebration, told an audience that included both the mayor and the school superintendent of Boston, as well as Hayes's daughter -- singer/actress/teacher Afrika Hayes-Lambe -- and her two daughters (Erika, who dances with the Boston Ballet, and Zaida Lambe), that the BSO was "committed to building bridges to every community in this city." And indeed, the opening-night BSO audience was the most racially integrated I've ever seen. But how does one get these youngsters, or any of the more prosperous attendees of color, to return to Symphony Hall?

I wish the video had been less condescending to both the general audience and the targeted students. The biographical narrative, including touching comments by Hayes-Lambe and Hayes's disciple, tenor Rawn Spearman, kept getting interrupted, not by Hayes's own chilling recording of "Lit'l boy," but by two black Boston cops singing it -- not so well -- to a captive handful of self-conscious black children. TV monitors scattered around Symphony Hall were showing the tape before the concert and during the intermission.

The BSO concert itself was also scattered with well-intentioned gestures that didn't quite add up. Seiji Ozawa led off with the Overture to Mozart's Cosí fan tutte, skillfully tossed from woodwind to woodwind but with no spark or glint ("glintless," as Seinfeld might say). This prepared us for African-American tenor and frequent BSO guest Vinson Cole, who sang Ferrando's arching, lovesick "Un aura amorosa" (same opera), and an early Mozart concert aria praising the Archbishop of Salzburg -- two pieces introduced to the BSO by Hayes (the Cosí aria at his 1923 BSO debut). Like Hayes, Cole is a restrained, tasteful singer with a voice less ringing than smoothly even from bottom to top. The Mozart was almost too pretty, and insufficiently shaped by Ozawa. The dramatic turns of Liszt's ardent Petrarch Sonnet No. 104, though, in Busoni's orchestration, provided Cole with the opportunity for greater vocal variety.

After intermission came the first BSO performance since 1945 of William Grant Still's In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (composed in wartime 1943) -- a dignified and musicianly funeral march with odd elements of Native American chant, as old-fashioned in its musical style and rhetoric (repeated trumpet fanfares, cymbal crash with slow fade-out, English-horn theme right out of the "Goin' Home" slow movement of Dvorák's New World Symphony) as in its title.

The big event should have been the world premiere of the AT&T-funded commission by 73-year-old composer George Walker, Lilacs, a four-part cantata for voice (another African-American BSO regular, soprano Faye Robinson, though the piece was originally announced for tenor Cole) and orchestra that sets the first three stanzas and the disconnected 13th stanza of Walt Whitman's Lincoln elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," a work as old-fashioned, in its way, as the Still. Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for Walker's murky serial-music version of Menotti-school lyric-recitative -- murky in tone if not in texture, since the instrumentation itself has a certain glamorously colorful transparency, though it doesn't avoid the TV-music clichés of that style: tremolo strings, heavy brass, and a drum roll; ominous brassy blurts punctuating pizzicato strings, whispering flutes, and rattlesnake maracas. And the high vocal line rendered Robinson's diction unintelligible. What good is setting a great poem so that it can't be understood?

Robinson's bright, high, sometimes shrill sound was less generic and more personal (though her diction wasn't better) in the real high point, the spirituals she and Cole alternated in at the end of the program -- a joy compromised by the schlocky Pops-style arrangements by Kim Scharnberg and Lars Clutterham (what would Hayes, who did his own moving arrangements, have thought?). "My soul's been anchored in the Lord" began with, of all things, a gritty Kurt Weill-ish klezmer brass that disjuncted into a Latin beat with electric guitar, harp, and triangle. The accompaniment threatened to turn the exquisite "This little light of mine" into a cocktail-lounge version of "Over the Rainbow." Cole sang "His name so sweet" to some "choo-choo" rhythms; his heartbreaking "Let us break bread together" was served with a brass carillon. For all Ozawa's vigorous efforts to keep the volume down, the orchestra often covered the vocals. Robinson's high-flying euphoria was catching, despite the phony swing arrangement of the final "Ain'ta that good news."

The BSO staff worked overtime to prepare this event, and maybe this time the intention was more important than the result. (What would Hayes have said?) Closing night, two uncluttered, unaccompanied encores -- Cole's intensely inward "Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile" and Robinson's impassioned "City of Heaven" -- were the best tribute of all to Hayes's legacy.

The following evening, NEC presented another tribute to Hayes. Hayes-Lambe and bass-baritone Mark Pearson, who's been teaching voice at NEC for 30 years, reminisced about Hayes before a recital by two stellar African-American artists with ties to NEC. Violist Marcus Thompson and baritone (and Pearson student, now Met star) David Arnold, assisted lovingly by pianists Judith Gordon and John McDonald, gave classy performances of both classical repertoire (Handel, Schumann) and what Hayes called "Aframerican religious folk songs" in arrangements by Clarence Cameron White (for viola) and Hayes himself -- whose versions are so eloquent and indrawing they are less accompaniments than conceptions. I wish Arnold had memorized all four spirituals -- he was so much freer and more communicative when his eyes met the audience. But "Lit'l boy" and "Round about de mountain" ("The Lord loves a sinner") made one gasp with their beauty and conviction. In between, Arnold and Thompson joined forces with McDonald for the premiere of Alan Fletcher's setting of Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole," a piece perhaps too self-consciously twilit, though it came to life in the last stanza with Thompson's haunting harmonics and Arnold's disembodied half-voice.

A piece of new music has two problems: either it doesn't get performed or it doesn't get performed again. With Collage celebrating its 24th year of playing new music, director David Hoose chose a program of significant recollections. Roger Sessions's 66-year-old Piano Sonata No. 1, one of the most seductive works by someone whose music got more and more austere, got a riveting if not exactly ravishing performance by the estimable Christopher Oldfather. Gunther Schuller's Bouquet for Collage (1987) has densely pun-filled movements like Mellow Cello (with Joel Moerschel), Frolicking Fiddle (Ronan Lefkowitz), With Mallets Aforethought (Frank Epstein), Darkly Somber (Gary Gorczyca, on the jazzy yet eerie bass clarinet), Pixie-ish (Jacqueline DeVoe on piccolo), Capriccio: Eine Kleine Ragtime Musik, and so forth. Mario Davidovsky's 1985 Salvos are acoustical "bagatelles" by a master electronician -- strange, knotty works in electric performances. And Yehudi Wyner's gorgeous 1982 William Carlos Williams song cycle, On This Most Voluptuous Night ("Love, the sun/comes/up in//the morning,/and/in//the evening -- /zippe, zappe! -- /it goes"), was sung here with mercurial charm, sensuous intensity, flawless diction, and vocal radiance by the mercurial, intense, charming, radiant, and flawless Dominique Labelle. Wyner called it the performance of his dreams.

It's good to be reminded of these (mostly) delectable and compelling works. Collage returns March 31 to some of the latest work by master contemporaries and a Boston premiere by the still teenaged Gordon Beeferman.

At Brown Hall, Mark Pearson came up with a fascinating program in a forgotten genre: the melodrama, with texts spoken over -- or between -- musical accompaniments. Best were the short pieces by Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt, though pianist Terry Decima's accompaniment was more expressive than Pearson's dry declamation. Francis Poulenc's pungent and playful Story of Babar (The Little Elephant) offered a livelier Pearson, though one who occasionally veered into archness (John Felice was his vibrant if sloppy accompanist). Cellist and NEC president Laurence Lesser had a field day punctuating and puncturing Grant Beglarian's Of Fables, Foibles, and Fancies (1971). But aren't there more pieces with less Mickey Mouse music and more sophisticated texts, or pieces with a more subtle interaction between the two?