The hills that were alive with the sound of music last weekend were surely the Berkshires. In their Tanglewood debut, the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai and her husband, pianist Hartmut Höll, presented an evening of Hugo Wolf songs and Robert Schumann cycles in the echo chamber of Seiji Ozawa Hall. And down the road, at Jacob's Pillow, Mark Morris -- perhaps among all choreographers the one most attracted to vocal music -- offered four of his most appealing dances: Somebody's Coming To See Me Tonight, set to songs, duets, and vocal ensembles by Stephen Foster; A Spell, comedy (and more) to a sometimes literally Shakespearean group of John Wilson songs; and Brahms's first set of Love Song Waltzes. In addition, Morris's solo Ten Suggestions embodies in his body 10 lively, teasing Bagatelles by Alexander Tcherepnin (which scintillated under pianist Linda Dowdell's nimble fingers). As with Balanchine, you could go to a Mark Morris program just to hear the music.

The closest thing we have in this country to a real team of lieder artists is probably Joan Morris and William Bolcom. (I'd love to hear what Morris can do with a lied or chanson alongside her matchless American theater songs.) Shirai and Höll offer the same kind of teamwork in an even more rarefied genre. They complete each other, read each other's thoughts. One indelible moment came in the heartstopping postlude to the last song in Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben ("A Woman's Love/A Woman's Life"). Shirai stood staring off into the music, her memory of the opening music of the cycle, when she was still the young girl who had just fallen in love with the man whom she married and had a child with, and who had just died. Höll played this with supreme delicacy, an echo that refused to die yet soon must. In her silence, Shirai seemed to be living through everything else in the cycle she had been singing about. (A burst of thoughtless applause just before the last two bars shattered the mood of held-breath intimacy.)

I had some reservations about this cycle. Höll's non-stop plunge into the stabbing first chord of the final song left no space for any transition from the joy of childbirth to the devastation of a sudden death. Surely even in Adalbert von Chamisso's saccharine poems the husband doesn't drop dead the instant his child is born. A novel approach that worked better was the way Shirai takes the feelings in these songs seriously without resorting to an overt, acted-out progression from naive young woman to mature, ecstatic, then suffering adult (a young person's emotions are as real and serious as an adult's), though the cycle can also work the other way.

Shirai and Höll opened courageously with Schumann's late cycle of poems by Mary Stuart as she faces death. With a regal, declamatory melancholy, at times pushing the borders of propriety, they caught the passionate dignity of Schumann's austere recitatives -- more shapely and rich-textured than mere recitative. In Mary's outburst to Elizabeth, Shirai made you feel she was speaking to someone she'd known all her life, someone she feared and hated yet for whom she still had a remnant of unwanted admiration.

The pair were then uncannily mercurial in a series of Wolf songs depicting different images of women: flirt, "fallen" maiden, cryptic (deranged?) Gypsy, Goethe's life-loving Philine, and in the magnificent "Kennst du das Land," his eloquent, humane Mignon, desperately nostalgic for something better -- and lost. The two memorable encores were Wolf's scintillating, almost reckless "Virgin's Lullaby" (so different from Brahms's warmer, smoother version with viola) and Schumann's large, aching, otherworldly, indrawing, and ironic "Stille Tränen" ("Silent Tears"). I can't remember wanting so much for a concert not to end.

Two great American lieder singers, soprano Jeanne Ommerle and baritone James Maddalena, were half the superbly matched vocal quartet in Mark Morris's dance program at Jacob's Pillow (the first time he's brought live music in 10 years of playing there -- it's not a place you'd ordinarily go for lieder singing). For his elegiac tribute to the dignity and charm and courtesy of lost, Civil War-torn 19th-century Americana, Morris uses some Stephen Foster songs that are as good as anything by Schumann or Wolf. Maddalena and Ommerle alternated sublime verses of "Beautiful Dreamer" and debated like Romeo and Juliet -- in "Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?" -- whether 'twas the nightingale they were hearing (celebrating the night still lying ahead) or the lark (signaling the morning after). Maddalena was particularly spirited in "Katy Bell" (because his real-life wife is the lovely soprano Katie Galvin?), and Ommerle's heavenly voice alone raised the hushed embroidery of "Linger in Blissful Repose" ("In melody I'll breathe my soul away") to a consoling timeless stillness.

British tenor Rufus Müller and mezzo Jennifer Lane contributed elegant, animated back-ups to some of Foster's more outgoing numbers. Lane's agile dark gleam gave the Wilson songs, especially the final "Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away," an ardent edge (though she might think a bit more about diction). And in the Brahms all four voices interwove and blended with a refined yet fevered eloquence. Watching as much as they could from the side of the stage, the singers seemed inspired by Morris's loving, interweaving community of beautiful dancers -- and were surely inspiring them in return.