E-Mail This Article to a Friend A sort of homecoming James Levine, plus BMOP and the St. Lawrence String Quartet BY DAVID WEININGER

Next week, James Levine will make the last of his once-a-year quick trips to Boston to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Beginning in the 2004-2005 season, the BSO will finally remove that pesky "designate" tag on his music-director title and he’ll settle in for good at the helm of the Old Towne Team.

Levine’s annual pilgrimages north from his home base of New York have become some of the most eagerly awaited of Boston music events, and for obvious reasons. Beyond the fact that he’s one of the most gifted conductors working today, we’ve become accustomed to reading his programs like tea leaves for clues about the direction in which he’ll steer the BSO when he’s here full-time. Those hints are hard to find if you don’t keep up with the inventive orchestral and chamber programs he sculpts for the Metropolitan Orchestra’s players when they’re not in the opera pit. Furthermore, Levine doesn’t record much these days, and when he does, it’s often in the role of an accompanist in concertos.

All the more welcome, then, is a recent DVD of Beethoven’s great (and only) opera, Fidelio, from Deutsche Grammophon, which wisely let the cameras role three years ago on a new production by modernist director Jürgen Flimm. Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, in the "lead role" of Leonore (who disguises herself as the title character to infiltrate a Spanish prison and free her political-prisoner husband, Florestan), has a grasp of Leonore’s unyielding ethical resilience that, combined with the astonishing command and beauty of her voice, places her portrayal in the ranks of Christa Ludwig and Kirsten Flagstad. Canadian tenor Ben Heppner brings similar musical and dramatic fireworks to Florestan: his opening scene in act two, where he laments his fate but defends his duty, is wrenching in its pathos. The supporting cast, including René Pape, Falk Struckmann, and Jennifer Welch-Babidge — is first-rate.

It used to be fashionable to say that Fidelio was a great opera only because of the composer attached to it, and that its musical successes couldn’t mask its dramatic failings. Although that view has mostly (and deservedly) gone by the boards, it’s true that Fidelio’s success depends on the conductor and the musicians to an unusual degree. Beethoven’s music gives the somewhat hoky story its moral force, becoming a moving paean to the idea of universal freedom. Levine and the Met players accomplish this heavy task as brilliantly as Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler once did. So expert are the conductor’s pacing, tempos, and balances, and so magnificently do the orchestra and the chorus respond to his direction, that this rather motley collection of scenes seems to pass by in a single, powerful sweep.

Fidelio was one of many new productions of standard fare that Levine has re-energized in recent years, along with Mozart’s Le nozze de Figaro, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin, and Verdi’s Nabucco. But in the orchestral realm — and even more in the chamber concerts he oversees — he loves to juxtapose heterogeneous works and let the exotic and the familiar resound together in the listener’s mind. That impulse, as well as his love for American music, informs this year’s BSO program, which is built around that indefatigable contemporary master Elliott Carter. Levine will premiere the BSO-commissioned Micomicón, an orchestral fantasy based on an episode from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as well as Carter’s earlier Partita. Bookending the evening are two symphonies: Mozart’s Paris (No. 31) and Dvorák’s sublime Eighth. Performances of this marvelous jumble take place on January 15 and 17 at 8 p.m. and January 16 at 1:30 p.m., at Symphony Hall. Tickets, which are likely to be in short supply, are $26-$95; call (617) 266-1200.

SAME BAT TIME, DIFFERENT BAT CHANNEL. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project offers a free concert centered on Boston-based composers and performers, including New England Conservatory’s Michael Gandolfi and Gunther Schuller. That’s at Jordan Hall on January 17 at 8 p.m.; call (617) 363-0396. At exactly the same time, one of the best young string quartets around, the St. Lawrence, hits town with a program of Haydn, Ravel, and Osvaldo Golijov’s magnificent The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, with clarinettist Todd Palmer. Part of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, it also takes place on January 17 at 8 p.m., at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Tickets are a steal at $31-$41; call (617) 482-6661.