Jules Massenet’s "Miracle in Three Acts," Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, is an operatic rarity, and its inclusion in this season’s Boston Academy of Music schedule is typical of the way Richard Conrad has run that organization since he founded it 22 years ago: a little Gilbert & Sullivan mixed with unusual musical-theater repertoire like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark, Puccini’s least-often performed late masterworks, Il trittico (brilliantly staged by Conrad) and La fanciulla del West, Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (not so rare in the world, but unperformed in Boston for decades), Richard Strauss’s Arabella, and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa (which has been recorded by Naxos to be released next year). Ambitious and remarkably successful work for a small company operating on a shoestring.

Jongleur marks the 41st anniversary of Conrad’s operatic debut, in a production at the Wilbur Theatre. This new production would have made an ideal valedictory vehicle, but on August 1, the board of directors deposed him as artistic director of his own company (his last scheduled appearances with BAM will be in February, when he’ll sing a role written for him in a new one-act opera by Daniel Pinkham based on Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Cask of Amontillado" and stage the other Pinkham one-act sharing that bill). As Boniface, the sympathetic Cook who is the poor Juggler’s only friend in the monastery he has joined in 14th-century Cluny — not Conrad’s original role (in the 1961 photo of him in the program, as the Poet Monk, he looks like a tonsured David Spade) — he gave one of his best recent performances. His frayed baritone was more focused than it’s been in some time, and his characterization was touchingly understated.

At the curtain call for the final performance, Conrad received an outpouring of affection and gratitude from the audience. But nowhere in the program, not even in his biography, was there any mention of his 22-year directorship — or even any reference to how long the company has been in existence (his name is still listed as artistic director on the publicity brochure). I guess the new administration wants to start from scratch, but is it a good idea to disregard the major source of public trust in this company?

The opera itself is appealing, though the musical pieties of the last minute or so are laid on a little thick (the statue of the Virgin starts to move, accepting the Juggler’s tricks and songs as his heartfelt gift; then angels burst into song). Massenet filters some fascinating faux mediævalisms and plainchant through his richly textured late-19th-century scoring (the opera premiered in 1902), with some foreshadowings of the more acerbic harmonies of Poulenc — including imaginative writing for the solo viola depicting the Juggler’s hurdy-gurdy (Lisa Suslowicz) and a harp part of diaphanous delicacy (Martha Moor). The impressive orchestra (Tison Street was the concertmaster) was led with precision, shapely elegance, and passion by Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee, in his company debut. The splendid small chorus sounded four times its size.

The cast was one of BAM’s most consistently convincing. Resonant baritone David Stoneman was the rigid Prior, in charge of a vivid flock of self-important friars: Drew Poling (the full-voiced Musician Monk), David M. Cushing (the Sculptor Monk), Bryan McNeil (the Painter Monk), Mark Nemeskal (a particularly effective Poet Monk), and Joe Dan Harper (the Crier Monk) — all BAM alums.

Richard Conrad aside, though, this is a one-man opera, and in the role of the innocent Juggler, Jean, whose empty stomach and spiritual hunger lead him to give up his roving life and enter the monastery, it’s hard to imagine improving upon that endearing BAM stalwart, tenor Ray Bauwens (against Massenet’s intentions, this role became a celebrated vehicle for the legendary soprano Mary Garden, Debussy’s original Mélisande). Bauwens has always been a game performer. Here he not only had to sing and dance but also had to juggle (which he did with commendable success). His big voice filled Northeastern’s Blackman Theatre (BAM’s home this season while the Emerson Majestic is being restored to its original glory). My only reservation is that he rarely sang softly, and a few well-placed pianissimos would not have been amiss. But his uninhibited "private performance" for the Blessed Virgin, the emotional center of the opera, was one of the most moving opera performances I’ve seen in years. "It made me cry," a friend admitted, and I had to confess the same.

Tim Jozwick’s picture-card pretty sets of Cluny’s cloisters were abetted by Christopher Ostrom’s complex lighting scheme and Toni Elliott’s colorful though more conventional costumes, but they left only a narrow playing space, which Bill Fabris’s primitive stage direction didn’t sufficiently contend with. Does every mediæval crowd scene have to have jolly townspeople dancing in a circle? But cheers to everyone else, and my continuing gratitude to Richard Conrad and best wishes for a fulfilling post-BAM career.

LAST WEEK’S BSO PROGRAM was another juggling act. It was certainly an eccentric trio. We got the American premiere of a seven-year-old work, Moon and Star, by British composer Judith Weir, which includes a choral setting of a relatively obscure Emily Dickinson poem. Then Ravel’s jazzy, gorgeous, and relatively lightweight G-major Piano Concerto (1931), with a rare BSO appearance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who’s best known for his impressive work in more complex modern music. And finally Prokofiev’s theatrically powerful and colorful choral cantata Aleksandr Nevsky, the concert version he arranged from the music he wrote for Russian director Sergei Einsenstein’s 1938 film epic. Two of these works have a chorus, two of them have good tunes, and all of them were composed in the 20th century; but you’d have to work hard to find further connections. Still, it was refreshing to hear an international program without the usual suspects. And an appropriate concert to be played on the birthday (October 10) of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, who loved and played music, and who was being honored that day by concerts all over the world.

The conductor was Sir Andrew Davis, whose peripatetic career has now led him to the music directorship of the Chicago Lyric Opera. Since his BSO debut, in 1976, he’s been a frequent visitor to Symphony Hall. He’s a lively musician of solid musical authority, though the most technically incompetent performance I ever heard of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps was Davis’s when he was director of the Toronto Symphony. He was at his best in the Weir, a piece that for me didn’t add up to much more than a technically sophisticated, outer-spacy "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" — without the memorable tune (my heart sank at the line in Weir’s program note that said, "Clear projection of the poem was not a priority"); and in the Prokofiev, which he let build, without forcing, to a cataclysmic climax in the famous battle on the ice. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, in spectacular shape this season, was stunning — various in character (the grim Russian enemy chanting nonsense Latin, the embattled and triumphant Russian people) and singing, from memory, in Russian. American mezzo Nancy Maultsby was effective, with a throbbing, deep Slavic alto sound — though it wasn’t the sound of the young woman in the movie, who is willing to betroth herself to whichever of her two lovers survives the battle.

The Ravel was more complicated. Smart, sentimental, and peppy, it would have been better if it had been luminous, scintillating, and insinuating. The concerto opens with a snap of the whip, but the whip snap itself was a dud (a rare gaffe from the percussion section), and Davis was neither ironic nor sincere enough. Aimard played elegantly with limpid tone but without the perfume — or, alternatively, the bite, the angularity — this piece thrives on.

LAST SPRING, Emmanuel Music ended the sixth season of its Schubert series with the Lydian String Quartet and guest second-cellist Paul Katz playing the expansively melodic and heart-easing Quintet in C major, one of Schubert’s most beloved pieces. The seventh and last Schubert season just began with the Lydians playing Schubert’s final quartet, the tense and tragic G-major. But this time, cellist Rhonda Rider, one of the founders of the Lydians 22 years ago, was no longer playing (she’s devoting herself to the other group she founded, the remarkable piano trio Triple Helix), and the Lyds’ new cellist, Joshua Gordon, was in her place, creating a rather different sound for this admirable group.

This beautiful and exciting performance was at its best in the first two movements (the damp weather was affecting intonation). The slow introduction was perfectly paced. The marvelous violin solo, with those uncanny shivers from the other players, gave me chills. As did the main theme of the slow movement — an embodiment of heartbreak — with its phrase ending in a helpless throwing up of hands: "That’s the way it is — what can we do?" Schubert’s sinister tarantella in the last movement — not exactly a happy ending — was also gauged just right.

Gordon is more recessive than Rider. He doesn’t quite sing out — though that’s partly an aspect of this knotty piece. He seems rather more like Emmanuel Feuermann, a player of quiet intensity and musical refinement, compared with Rider’s Casals, who’s deeply probing, subtle but with a capacity for grandeur. As opposed to the Borromeo Quartet, whose two recent changes emphasized continuity of approach, the Lydians, after so many years, may be trying something new. Gordon’s narrower sound might be a better match for first-violinist Daniel Stepner’s mercurial incisiveness, and together they might offer a better balance for the warmth of second-violinist Judith Eissenberg and violist Mary Ruth Ray. It’s too soon to tell, of course, but the news so far is pretty good.

The program opened with a delicious group of little-known vocal quartets and solos, songs that looked forward to both Brahms and Mahler, with soprano Kendra Colton, mezzo Pamela Dellal, tenor Ryan Turner, and bass Paul Guttry tenderly and wittily accompanied by pianist Kayo Iwama. The most successful solos were Dellal’s urgent, prayerful "Die Gestirne" ("The Constellations") and her dramatically contrasted "Der Schäfer und der Reiter" ("The Shepherd and the Horseman") and Colton’s lamenting "Lied" ("Song"), about parents facing the death of a child, with its haunting purity and stoicism. The series continues November 10 at Suffolk’s C. Walsh Theatre, but what I can’t wait for is Alfonso und Estrella, February 1 at Emmanuel Church, which will be my first live performance of a Schubert opera.