Things are swinging in Brooklyn. At the Academy of Music, the Mark Morris Dance Group is celebrating its 20th-anniversary season with a three-week run, one highlight of which is the New York premiere of Morris’s version of the first of Virgil Thomson & Gertrude Stein’s two extraordinary collaborations, Four Saints in Three Acts, with Morris’s frequent collaborator, Emmanuel Music director Craig Smith, conducting. (It shared a double bill with Morris’s dark, political World Power, in which the dancers, masters and slaves, wear black costumes and cast large shadows against a black backdrop — to gamelan music by Lou Harrison, with its third-world evocations and shocking discordances, eloquently played by Gamelan Son of Lion.) Across the street, the new Mark Morris Dance Center is under construction, with three floors for dancers (the largest of its three dance studios, 60 by 60, has enough room for scenery, lighting, and 150 seats), offices, dressing rooms, physical therapy, kitchens, bathrooms, and showers, plus a floor for commercial space, possibly a restaurant. General director Barry Alterman was the ecstatic tour guide.

Sitting next to me at Four Saints was a friend of Thomson’s who said that Thomson had wished musicians would think of his masterwork less as an opera than as an oratorio that could be performed in concert, without scenery or costumes (though Florine Stettheimer’s cellophane decor for the 1934 premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford got at least as much attention as the score itself and the all-black cast). Sitting across the aisle was Morris’s most famous collaborator, Paul Simon, whose controversial Broadway music drama Capeman Morris directed.

Four Saints brings the Adorable to the level of the Profound. Stein includes more like seven saints but concentrates on two, the Spanish saints Teresa and Ignatius. The text is nonlinear and nonlogical, yet both enchanting and heartbreaking. Saint Ignatius’s vision of the Holy Spirit: “Pigeons on the grass alas.” Cycles of birth, love, and death: “In dead in wed in dead wed led.” Thomson’s score is cheeky in its faux simplicity (hymn tunes, cowboy songs, gospel songs), inspired in the variety and surprising combination of sources, and magical in melodic invention.

I’ve seen it only twice before. Last year’s delightful version with students at the Boston Conservatory was far superior to the pretentious and leaden Robert Wilson production made for the Houston Grand Opera and given at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival. Four Saints is lighter than air — it’s nothing if not buoyant. It mustn’t be weighty for a second. In a way, Thomson is right. Singers moving on a stage, even under expert direction, already compromise this free-spiritedness.

But dancers are a different kind of creature. And who knows this better than Mark Morris? So he uses Thomson’s own 1947 abbreviation (which he recorded), adds several more sections, puts the singers in the pit with the orchestra (in London he had them up in the boxes), and fills the stage with airborne dancers dressed in Elizabeth Kurtzman’s earth-hued Spanish ruffles, toreador pants, bandanas, and roses-in-the-hair.

John Heginbotham’s barechested, touchingly vulnerable Saint Ignatius — ready to be martyred — wears only calf-length white knickers with a white sash around his waist. He’s also a prankster. In “Pigeons on the grass,” he does a kind of sidewise strut, a cakewalk. He spins to a spiraling trumpet in “around is a sound.” He floats across the stage in a barefoot bourrée, arms outstretched (later, other dancing saints push groups of bourréeing saints, as if they were moving scenery).

Young Michelle Yard, one of Morris’s African-American dancers, is brilliant and comic as Saint Teresa. She leaps and spins in a short-short white chemise (a loose, see-through nightie with the same embossed white flowers that are on Saint Ignatius’s belt). To “In dead wed led” she moves in solemn procession against a morphing human frieze of Spanish poses. The end of act three (there are actually four acts) finds Saint Teresa as a hardboiled bouncer with the list of those who are allowed into Heaven while Ignatius holds open the front scrim (poor, downcast David Leventhal is endearing as the crestfallen gate crasher who doesn’t fight rejection but keeps trying again and again anyway).

Morris provides the company with hoedowns and minstrel shows, revival meetings, marches, and fandangos (actually an assortment of real Spanish folk dances), the mood shifting as mercurially as Thomson’s score. A series of plunging dips and jubilant risings under and through “London Bridges” formations becomes the very embodiment of exultation. This all takes place against four ebullient Marimekko backdrops designed by children’s-book and New Yorker illustrator Maira Kalman. The ending is literally uplifting: Yard sitting on a swing, Heginbotham standing above her, the two of them swinging their way into Heaven.

Morris has now presented more than 350 consecutive performances with live music. I saw the second of three New York stagings. The Times’ reviewer, Thomson biographer Anthony Tommasini, reported that the musical rendition on opening night had been disappointing. By my night, Smith’s sparkling orchestra was sharp as a tack, completely with the dancers and with Thomson’s freewheeling and dramatic shifts of tone. Soprano Jayne West sang an exquisite Teresa, baritone William Sharp a forthright, full-bodied Ignatius. Other soloists were less authoritative and the chorus was a little thin. Even with modest amplification, words tended to get lost in the Brooklyn Academy’s blurry acoustic. More remarkable was how many got through. Above all, Morris’s choreography — no, his vision — allowed Thomson and Stein to get through. (For Marcia Siegel’s assessment of Four Saints in Three Acts, see page 13.)

FEW MUSICIANS are as warmly regarded as mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who now, still in excellent voice, is slowly withdrawing from her career obligations. Every appearance now has a particular poignance. Whoever suggested that she team up with the popular 12-man San Francisco–based a cappella vocal ensemble Chanticleer (which includes three male sopranos and three male altos) should go stand in the corner. At their FleetBoston Celebrity Series concert at Symphony Hall, Chanticleer “accompanied” Stade in arrangements of Cantaloube’s arrangements of French folk songs (Chants de France), three Mahler Rückert Songs, a new piece by San Francisco composer Jake Heggie to an original text by Armistead Maupin (four monologues in the voice of his Tales of the City transsexual heroine Anna Madrigal), some Stephen Sondheim, and other show tunes.

This purely vocal accompaniment was like some classy form of elevator music. It drained the music of any hint of emotion (something especially hard to do with Mahler). In “Send In the Clowns,” Chanticleer sounded like the Chordettes singing “Mister Sandman,” drowning Sondheim’s wry song in a treacly tempo. The only moment in the Heggie piece that conveyed any character was the one line Stade spoke rather than sang (“Give the old lady a joint, and you can’t shut her up!”).

Jerome Kern’s “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” though, had one nice joke: a musical quote from “Voi che sapete,” an aria on a similar theme sung by the cross-dressing Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — one of the roles most associated with Stade. Carmen, on the other hand, is a role not associated with Stade at all. But the wit and sexy wisdom and vocal elegance of her “Habanera,” her first encore, made me regret her decision not to sing the complete opera. Unfortunately, Chanticleer made this most famous of operatic sexual anthems sound like a lullaby. Some collaborations are just bad ideas.

AT HIS RECENT Gardner Museum recital, pianist Russell Sherman’s collaborators were, as always, the composers whose music he plays. He’s always revealing things you never noticed before: harmonies, structures, rhythms, musical lines. This time his entire program was a delicious series of short pieces that he called “Favorite Encores” but which added up to a fascinating and shapely single work, an adventure in contrasting movements, by Mozart, Beethoven and Bartók (two Bagatelles), Chopin (an especially poignant C-sharp-minor Nocturne), Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt (an especially ebullient Soirée de Vienne), Debussy, and Scriabin, with, one hypnotic encore, Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” in which Sherman set the deliberately monotonous two-note theme of the “melody” against the more slippery musical slope of Gershwin’s insinuating accompaniment.

A week later, Sherman reprised “The Man I Love” in a tribute by the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra to its distinguished principal guest conductor, Renaissance man Gunther Schuller — composer, conductor, teacher, author, publisher, producer, administrator, horn player, and even, as he admitted to interlocutor Steven Ledbetter, former boy soprano. It took two and a half hours without an intermission to suggest the range of Schuller’s interests — from jazz and ragtime to classical to “Third Stream” (a term he coined when he was president of the New England Conservatory) — and the affection he inspires in his colleagues, disciples, and family.

The Gershwin was Sherman’s unscheduled encore after playing Brahms and Liszt (“You know,” Schuller ad-libbed, “I think we could get him a job at the Colonnade Hotel”). Among the others paying tribute in word and deed were classical-pianist Veronica Jochum (playing Schuller’s Sandpoint Rag); BSO bassists Ed Barker, Lawrence Wolfe, James Orleans, and Todd Seeber doing a movement from Schuller’s elegant and difficult 1947 Quartet for Double Basses; NEC’s Third Stream guru, Ran Blake, playing one of his own piano improvisations; “multi-saxophonist” Joe Lovano, jazz-soprano Judi Silvano (Lovano’s wife), and Schuller’s sons, Ed (a brilliant jazz bassist) and George (a brilliant drummer); and of course members of the Pro Arte. The loving if exhausting evening closed with Schuller conducting his moving Lament for M — a memorial piece for his late wife, Marjorie, that bridges jazz and classical practices, with Lovano’s eloquently grieving saxophone, the Schuller boys’ intricate rhythm section, and the Pro Arte providing some classical class.