To round out Monadnock Music’s 37th season, music director James Bolle has assembled a couple of superb programs for the Peterborough Town House. The first part of the Music of Our Time evening ("our time" means music composed between 1923 and a few months ago) was about as imaginatively organized as a concert can get.

The starting point was the earliest piece, Stravinsky’s insouciant and captivating Octet for Winds (flute, clarinet, two trumpets, two bassoons, and two trombones). The first-movement Sinfonia is something between a march and a fanfare — a parade is passing, and we’re right in the middle of it. The Theme with Variations movement passes from inebriated sideshow to sloshed waltz to a train chugging us ominously to a place behind the looking glass where it’s almost as if we were hearing the music backwards. The Finale ends with a lightfooted, dancing coda. Bolle led a blissfully buoyant performance.

Stravinsky was followed by an American composer who began in serious debt to him, Elliott Carter. But these were Carter’s latest pieces, his ambitious Quartet for Oboe and Strings (Carter himself played oboe, so all of his oboe music takes on autobiographical overtones) and the American premiere of his brief Au quai (pronounced "okay" and dedicated to another OK, composer Oliver Knussen). The Oboe Quartet (completed last year) immediately sets the oboe against the three strings (critics?), who aren’t always in agreement with one another. The oboe (John Dee) honks at them; they ignore him. The violin (Curtis Macomber) sings an aria; the oboe blithely disregards it. The players come close to spiritual union, in gossamer veils of overlapping strings, whispered whirrings against quiet, long-sustained notes on the oboe; but this sublime moment is interrupted by the cello (Gregory Hesselink) dancing a jig (or gigue). Violence erupts: slashing strings, oboe blasts. By the end, there’s some reconciliation, but it remains fragile through the last tentative mutter from the viola. I gather that Consuelo Sherba replaced the originally scheduled violist and had to learn the part in little more than two days. You couldn’t tell. Everyone played from inside the music.

Au quai is a serio-comic quarrel between a supercilious viola (Christof Huebner) and an in-your-face bassoon (Stéphane Lévesque). "Peasant!" the viola says. "Up yours!" the bassoon replies. The little badminton volleying in the middle, one note apiece from each player, an exercise in futile oneupmanship, was a particular delight.

The set ended with Mario Davidovsky’s 1999 Festino notturno ("Little Night Festival") uncannily pulling together everything we heard before: music for strings and winds, music for a parade, music simultaneously witty and meltingly sensual (the intimacy of those string harmonies) — music suffused with atmosphere and incident and color. Trumpeter Richard Kelley deserves special praise for his remarkable capacity to alternate fortissimo trumpet blasts with the most delicately muted insinuations.

After intermission came Euro-Disney, by one of Bolle’s favorite younger composers, Mark Kuss, whose sense of humor I applaud though neither the music nor Kuss’s pervasive irony about it (undercutting lyrical themes with the Armour frankfurter music) sounded original enough to make me laugh; and an exhilarating performance of Kurt Weill’s rarely played pre–Threepenny Opera, pre-Mahagonny Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra (1924). The latter owes an enormous debt to the Stravinsky of L’histoire du soldat, with its fox-trotting princess and fiddling Devil, and another to the Mahler of remembered barracks and marching armies and inventive sonorities for winds. Of course, one can also preview the Weill we know in the chiaroscuro of the opening wind chords, and in the soulful, interior, close-to-ironic but still-unsoured romanticism of the violin song, which was gorgeously played by Monadnock’s concertmaster, Ole Bohn (for whom Elliott Carter wrote his Violin Concerto).

Next day, Bolle’s program worked for more dramatic variety. Stravinsky was back with his most luscious neo-classical work, the ballet Apollo (1928), all strings, and in the shadow of Tchaikovsky; and there was Beethoven’s glorious Seventh Symphony ("the apotheosis of the dance"). Bolle’s Apollo was strongly inflected and richly played; the Beethoven was not timid — exciting, but loud, with too many details getting obscured.

But what lured me back to Monadnock was baritone James Maddalena singing, for the first time, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children"). Maddalena is now best known for opera (in the Peter Sellars/Craig Smith Mozart and Handel productions and for creating the title role in John Adams’s Nixon in China). But for several decades he’s been one of the world’s most eloquent practitioners of the art song, often at Monadnock Music. His name somehow got left off the program, but few in the audience didn’t know who was singing. (It was more damaging not to have translations.)

Friedrich Rückert wrote his Kindertotenlieder poems (more than 400) after the deaths of his two youngest children. Mahler’s heartbreaking cycle preceded by a few years the death of his elder daughter, Maria, in 1907. Maddalena sang the five songs staring out into the audience with a glazed intensity — he could have been Wozzeck in a stunned trance — and he was in magnificent, vintage-Burgundy voice, "speaking" through his singing. The orchestra played with poignant expressivity, especially the English horn and oboe (John Dee and Sarah Stack) in the folk-like "Wenn dein Mütterlein" ("When your little mother"). Bolle let the proceedings get so loud, he forced Maddalena into overdrive at the very top of his voice; yet even that strain was charged with emotion. More performances might free Maddalena to make greater distinctions between unmediated lament and ironic lullaby — but who could forget this one?

I’VE BEEN TRAVELING hither (Jacob’s Pillow) and yon (Lincoln Center) to catch the Mark Morris Dance Group’s latest programs, in search of visual and aural satisfactions, and finding, as always, both, though not in the most predictable places. My Phoenix colleague Marcia Siegel has written in detail about Morris’s choreography at the Pillow. I’d like to add a few words about his use of live music.

The Jacob’s Pillow program both began and ended with Schumann. New York based Wolfram Koessel is the latest in the line of superlative cellists to play Schumann’s Fünf Stücke im Volkston ("Five Pieces in Folk Style"), for cello and piano, in Morris’s The Argument, which had its premiere at the Wang Theatre in 1999 with Yo-Yo Ma on stage with Mikhail Baryshnikov. A few years later, Matt Haimovitz was in the pit of the Shubert Theatre. These are hard acts to follow, but Koessel (with the Morris company’s soon-to-be-departing music director, pianist Ethan Iverson), back on stage, held his own in this alternately teasing and lyrical music, in which Morris’s dance also reveals an element of fiery anger.

In V, Morris’s latest "big" work, under not entirely satisfying circumstances (overamplification and the use of an electronic keyboard), the dancers were "partnered" by a vivid performance of Schumann’s greatest chamber work, his Piano Quintet in E-flat. The stellar pianist was Ilan Rechtman, who was alternating with Iverson. Within seconds, the delicacy and intensity and sweep of Rechtman’s playing made me forget the electronic substitution. The strings included violinists Wei-Pin Kuo (from the BU faculty, lately of the Muir Quartet) and Andrea Schultz, violist Jessica Troy, and Koessel, who made the great lyrical cello theme in the first movement sing and soar. The dancers visibly responded to this magnificent albeit magnified live performance.

One of Morris’s oddest musical conceptions is for his recent Foursome, a poignant — and perhaps autobiographical — piece for four male dancers (including Morris himself). Three of Satie’s off-kilter Gnossiennes (music inspired by the "Knossian" labyrinth on Crete), danced by the group of four, alternate with Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s charming Seven Hungarian Dances, for various configurations of couples. Iverson captured both the radical differences in style between these two composers a century apart and the surprising coherence of their mingling.

The Mostly Mozart Festival at the New York State Theatre hosted four performances of what is widely regarded as Morris’s greatest work, L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, which is set to Handel’s sublime evening-length oratorio based largely on the young John Milton’s famous pair of poems (Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, added "Il Moderato"). Handel turns Milton’s two large opposing voices into a kaleidoscope of continually contrasting short sections. Morris is at his most captivating and inventive, as is set designer Adrianne Lobel at hers.

At L’Allegro’s only Boston performance, at the Wang Theatre in 1994, members of the Emmanuel Orchestra and Chorus were conducted by Emmanuel Music’s Craig Smith, one of the world’s most profound Handel conductors (my 1994 review referred to his "uncanny combination of buoyancy, gravity, and amplitude"). At Lincoln Center, Nicholas McGegan, one of the least profound, led the early-instrument Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Morris and the dancers evidently like McGegan’s bouncy but square and choppy beat. Maybe the music doesn’t need to be about something when the dance itself is about so much: the joy of uncontrollable laughter, the exhilaration of the hunt, the sorrow of isolation and abandonment, the consolation of meditation, the quiet passion of lovemaking, the moving, uplifting pleasure of fellowship and mutual support. Near the end, for Handel’s only duet (Il Moderato’s heavenly "As steals the morn upon the night/And melts the shades away"), Morris created one of his most magical, intricately interweaving, stage-filling line dances, and at least soprano Christine Brandes and tenor John Mark Ainsley, despite their blurry diction, kept the music afloat. Boston soprano Dominique Labelle had the most beautiful and expressive voice, and baritone Philip Cutlip fleshed out the vocal quartet (as a group, the Boston singers — Jayne West, Jeanne Ommerle, Frank Kelley, and James Maddalena — were more eloquent, more elegant, and more comprehensible).

Thank you, FleetBoston Celebrity Series, for continuing to sponsor the Mark Morris Dance Group in Boston (it’ll be at the Shubert in March), but please, please bring back this glorious masterpiece. It’s been too long, and we need more than ever to see it — and hear it — here.