It’s nearly 14 years since Christoph von Dohnányi, recently named "music director laureate" of the Cleveland Orchestra, has been invited to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He made his BSO debut in 1989 and was scheduled to conduct two programs. But he left Boston before completing his first weekend, suffering from bronchitis and, perhaps, disgust. Rumors flew that rehearsals were unpleasant and that neither side was grieved to part company so soon. Dohnányi has been back here many times at the helm of the Cleveland Orchestra, but his only other encounter with the BSO was in 1998 as one of four conductors — along with Pierre Boulez, Kurt Masur, and Seiji Ozawa — leading 100 players from the major orchestras of Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, in a special benefit concert to raise funds for the long-term care of the incapacitated former BSO manager Ken Haas (who died in 2001).

Last week, then, marked Dohnányi’s second BSO subscription program, and no one, not the players and least of all the audience, seemed unhappy. It was the best BSO concert this fall. Dohnányi won a standing ovation, and the players applauded him as he applauded them.

Dohnányi has long been a champion of contemporary music. That 1989 BSO program began with György Ligeti. This time it began with an even newer work, an exciting, hugely enjoyable piece from 1997, Asyla, by the then 26-year-old British wunderkind Thomas Adès — another work of whose the BSO programmed three years ago. "For large orchestra," Asyla (the plural of "asylum" — both safe haven and crazy house) is a four-movement piece whose complex soundscape owes a little to Mahler (it begins with cowbells, with which Mahler suggests the otherworldly in his Sixth Symphony) and Benjamin Britten (the moaning horns remind me of Britten’s setting of Blake’s "The Sick Rose" in his famous Serenade for Tenor and Horn), a little to Wagner’s heavenly halos of strings, a little to Debussy’s diaphanous veils of impressionism, and more than a little to West Side Story and disco in its use of pop material.

I hadn’t much liked Adès’s Richard Straussian tone poem Living Toys, the piece the BSO played three years ago, but I found Asyla vividly imaginative and utterly riveting. It was edgily, even lushly melodic (I thought of Bernard Herrmann) without turning soupy. It was fascinating in texture and harmony — inventively colorful and atmospheric, rich but never clotted (the score calls for six percussionists and such uncanny sounds as two upright pianos, one tuned 1/4-tone low, trailing the melodic fragments like a comet’s tail, or the bewitching juxtaposition of piccolo and trumpets). Its rhythms were compelling — dancing, driving, pounding, yet without assaulting the ear (the third movement, Ecstasio, is said to depict a London disco club), or else languorously hypnotic and sighing. And it was ever-surprising in its mercurial shifts of mood (both within and between movements). It was like a 23-minute roller-coaster ride. Adès "writes for people," Dohnányi told WGBH’s Brian Bell.

Ironic that the newest work on the program was in unfashionable four movements whereas the oldest, Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 (his 1851 revision of what in 1841 was actually his second symphony), experimented by rolling four movements into a single continuous whole. As he did for the entire concert, Dohnányi used the old-style seating plan, putting first and second violins on opposite sides, to revelatory effect. You could actually hear one of the themes circling the stage as it passed from violas to second violins to firsts; you could hear the second violins completing — punctuating — a phrase begun in the firsts. Dohnányi kept Schumann’s notoriously thick textures limpid. And warm. There were rough spots in the playing, but not a second went by when the symphony didn’t seem to be about something (passion, tenderness, heroism, longing, joy) or going somewhere — building toward a triumphant climax by subtly pulling back so that when the triumph finally arrived, it would be even more gratifying.

These were the very qualities James Conlon lacked the week before in his pretty but unshaped, unpointed BSO performance of an earlier landmark of Romanticism, Schubert’s early Tragic Symphony. With the help of John Oliver’s astonishing Tanglewood Festival Chorus, however, he brought more life to the enchanting selections from Schubert’s incidental music for the play Rosamunde, which opened the program, and to the two Benjamin Britten choral pieces that followed them. In Britten’s early, extroverted, anti-war Ballad of Heroes, the exhilarating speed of the chorus racing through W.H. Auden’s "It’s farewell to the drawing room’s civilized cry" blurs the brilliant words whereas the composer allows the more-pedestrian verses by Randall Swingler to be more clearly intoned (Britten later developed into a far more sensitive text setter). The later, not-often-enough performed Cantata misericordium, an eerily unnerving, harmonically gorgeous setting of the Good Samaritan story, elevates the moving parable to the level of ritual. Conlon, the chorus, and the two soloists — American tenor John Aler, sounding a bit strained, and an impressive, creamy-voiced, intelligent young Welsh baritone, Christopher Maltman, in his BSO debut — captured that moment when abstraction and intense passion unite and held it in perfect balance.

Dohnányi ended with a glowing, warm-hearted performance of Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák’s From the New World Symphony — not Dohnányi’s own composition, as a listing in one of Boston’s alternative weeklies had it, though he certainly made it his own with the immediacy and flexibility of his phrasing, not to mention some memorable playing (Robert Sheena deserved his solo bow for his quietly songful English horn solo in the tune that would later become "Goin’ Home," as did oboist John Ferillo in the insinuating, melancholy Romanze of the Schumann).

Is there anyone who doesn’t want Dohnányi back — and soon?

AT THE BEGINNING of the fourth of the six movements of Mahler’s Third Symphony, a movement marked "Sehr langsam" ("very slow"), "Misterioso," and ppp throughout, the human voice enters for the first time — in Mahler’s setting of Nietzsche’s poem from the end of Also sprach Zarathustra. The alto sings an oracular utterance: "O Mensch! Gib Acht!" ("Oh Man! Pay heed!"). But this isn’t a warning — it’s more of a reminder. "The world is deep — deeper than Day imagined. Deep is its woe! Joy deeper still than the heart’s suffering." In Mahler’s original program, which he decided to leave out of the printed score, this brief movement is called "What Man tells me," and it follows what the flowers and the animals — wordlessly — have had to say, which comes after the vast half-hour opening movement Mahler thought of as the entire first part of a two-part symphony, a movement depicting a life-and-death struggle, the reawakening of Pan, the living force of Nature, rebirth after the mortal darkness of winter.

In Benjamin Zander’s latest performance of it with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, his third from when he first played it, in 1985, the alto was mezzo-soprano Jane Struss, Zander’s most sympathetic partner in Mahler for 27 years, ever since they collaborated on the "death of children" song cycle Kindertotenlieder, when Zander still conducted Boston’s Civic Symphony. Two other performers from that Kindertotenlieder were reunited with Struss in this movement, harpist Martha Moor and oboist Peggy Pearson. The movement begins with a series of plucked harp chords connected by muted rumblings in the lowest strings. Not the harp of angels. In Moor’s hand it seemed to reach down into the depths of the earth, just as Struss’s voice seemed almost unconsciously to arise from some deep wellspring out of the body. "What does the deep Midnight say?" she asks, and Pearson’s oboe answered with another question, an uncanny and technically "impossible" upward slide, almost a cry of pain (this was echoed by Ronald Kaye’s English horn).

This brief movement was, as it should be, the soul of the performance. Struss was in her most heartbreakingly beautiful, richest voice. Her assertion that "joy" is "deeper than suffering" moved me to tears, partly because it was so achingly beautiful, but even more because I believed her. "She causes us to enter her world," Zander said of her in his pre-concert talk. Then in the next movement, she speaks in the voice of tormented Peter, who can’t believe the angels can offer forgiveness. John Dunn’s Boston Boy Choir, up in the Sanders Theatre balcony, sounded, as they should, like boys imitating bells ("Bimm bamm bimm bamm"), and the women from Jeffrey Rink’s Chorus pro Musica, in the opposite side of the balcony, rained down their promise of heavenly joy. In a marvelous coup de théâtre, Struss and the two choirs remained standing for a few moments as the consoling beneficence of the final Adagio movement ("What love tells me") began — and began to sink in.

The entire symphony was splendidly performed. The opening call for eight horns sounded like a single instrument of annunciation. Darren Acosta gave an astonishing, moving rendition of the opening movement’s crucial trombone solos — complex recitatives and arias of lamentation ("fettered life in its chrysalis, striving for release," Mahler called them). Pearson’s oboe and concertmaster Wei-Pin Kuo’s violin, playing a tender lullaby for the sleeping Pan, were an oasis of enchantment. Nine percussionists rumbled and strutted and marched, getting closer and closer. Even on its vast scale, the movement flew past.

Part two (the flowers) began with a graceful, urbane Viennese minuet (oboe accompanied by pizzicato violas). In the Scherzo, the country music (the cuckoo has died, but the nightingale lives) is interrupted by the famous offstage reverie for "posthorn," Mahler’s childhood reminiscence from living near a military camp. Principal trumpet Jeffrey Work and the on-stage shimmer of pianissimo violin tremolos made it sound like poetry.

Zander’s inexorably unfolding slow Adagio was more controversial, especially in the way he evened out Mahler’s subtle changes of pace. (The textures would have been even more transparent had he, like Dohnányi, divided the first and second violins.) But I found his steadiness — and restraint — affecting, an embodiment of the "rich, fulfilled, noble tone" Mahler had hoped for. Before the concert, Zander talked about this symphony as a "weapon of mass construction." Hearing it in the immediacy of a live performance made it seem all the more urgent a prayer for love and forgiveness and peace.