Unless you’re Marcel Marceau, or a piano virtuoso, if you’re a performer, you can’t perform in a vacuum. Musicians especially need other musicians. And one of the problems about being a musician of rare gifts is that there’s only the rare handful of other musicians who play at your level. The Music & Arts label has just issued a CD with a live performance of Schubert’s B-flat Trio with three of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, pianist Artur Schnabel, violinist Joseph Szigeti, and cellist Pierre Fournier. They never made a commercial recording together, but they did give concerts together, and this disc reminds you how lucky you’d have been to be in their presence.

I’m thinking about this because one of our own most gifted and beloved performers, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, doesn’t perform often enough with artists on his level. When he does — as in a memorable benefit concert a decade ago in which he was joined by pianist Peter Serkin and violinist Pamela Frank — it’s thrilling. The audience was a privileged witness to an unforgettable "conversation." But in his Symphony Hall program for the FleetBoston Celebrity Series a week ago Wednesday, an evening of French music (sonatas by Debussy, Fauré, and Franck — the last two transcribed from violin sonatas — and the movement for cello and piano from Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps), Ma was back with his frequent partner, British pianist Kathryn Stott, who’s not in his league.

Ma’s phrases breathe and sing; there’s always a voice. Stott is a heavy-handed, uninspired player who merely hits the notes. The most successful selection was the Messiaen, because the piano is really the metronome against which the cello chants its threnody (this was composed in a German POW camp in 1940).

The two encores were revealing. Massenet’s "Meditation," from Thaïs (also transposed from violin), and Saint-Saëns’s "The Swan" are not collaborative pieces; they’re display pieces for a star soloist. The accompaniment is rhythmic wallpaper. Had Ma been playing with Peter Serkin or Emanuel Ax, these would never have been the encores. They were the acknowledgment that Ma was the main attraction. And in fact, we didn’t really hear the major pieces, because this partnership was so lopsided that it couldn’t do justice to them — to the dialogue. Maybe with a more sensitive, imaginative partner, the two transcribed sonatas might have also sounded more convincing, less strenuous, even with Ma’s buoyant legatos. Although it was the quirky, fanciful, unsettling late Debussy, with Ma’s pizzicatos sounding like a jazz bass or a guitar and Stott sounding like a rehearsal pianist, that got the rawest deal.

The following evening, the BSO, under Neville Marriner, offered a long program of English music: Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938), the Elgar Cello Concerto (1919), with Lynn Harrell, and Vaughan Williams’s pictorial A London Symphony (1914). There are some 20th-century British composers (Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies) whose music is not so relentlessly British, soft edges and rounded corners overflowing with autumnal nostalgia and elegy and rolled r’s. Marriner went about his business seriously, and Harrell is an admirably flexible player with an amber tone. Both caught the occasional humor, too. Little of this music cries out for profound interiority (though Jacqueline du Pré played the Elgar with astonishing urgency, and Yo-Yo Ma can be heartbreakingly beautiful). None of these pieces employs thematic material that opens itself to the richest kind of development. It was all high-minded or jolly and accomplished, but an electrifying evening it wasn’t.

IN ONE OF THE EXTRAORDINARY MOMENTS in the latest of her renditions of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), singing Wilhelm Müller’s poem about a signpost that points down a road "from which no one has yet returned," mezzo-soprano Jane Struss closed her lips in an uncanny act of ventriloquism and let the song emanate from her as if she had no body. This is the 20th of the 24 songs depicting a nightmare of desolation and loneliness. Struss performs them as if they were a play by Samuel Beckett. In "Der Wegweiser" ("The Signpost"), she sounded as if Schubert’s narrator were already dead — his voice echoing from beyond the grave, hollow yet chilling in its resonance.

Struss first started singing this 75-minute marathon back in 1985, and it was, as I recall, a struggle even then (it certainly shouldn’t sound easy). That struggle with an ideal has taken its toll on both the flexibility and the steadiness of her tone (though in the Mahler Third Symphony led by Benjamin Zander last fall, she had both). In this performance, for Janus 21 at Longy School last Friday, in her attempt to sing as if she had no breath, a crucial climactic note in the final song didn’t quite sound.

Yet even if she had no voice at all, her interpretation would be hair-raising, because it goes for broke, takes every risk, and confronts the inconsolable grief at the heart of the cycle. There’s a kind of grandeur to her daring, to her willingness to forgo tonal beauty for emotional truth. She can pour out sound in an anguished cry of pain or completely drain her voice of color. In the very first song, "Gute Nacht" ("Good night"), she changed the timbre of her voice at least half a dozen times to embody the radical mood swings from nostalgia for a happier time to the awareness of this self-delusion, the memory of bitter betrayal, and then to near madness as again the singer retreats into fantasy. Struss gave the repeated phrase about "moonshadow" a new meaning each time she sang it, like Frost’s "miles to go before I sleep."

Brian Moll, her skilled and thoughtful accompanist, here resisted fantasy by maintaining the steady pace of a funeral march, until even he melted into the singer’s dream world. In "Die Krähe" ("The Crow"), I admired the way the piano remained unaware of the way Struss seemed hypnotized by the (imagined?) bird circling overhead, awaiting its prey. Finally, in "Der Leiermann" ("The Organ Grinder"), Schubert’s poignantly ironic image of the artist who transforms human pain into music, both piano and singer seemed in a trance, beyond hope, but also beyond despair.

SURELY OPERA DEMANDS the greatest co-operative effort, but one of the most challenging of all operas, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, met with a brilliant success this past weekend at the multiple hands of David Hoose, the Cantata Singers, and an impeccable cast, with illuminating stage direction by Lynn Torgove, who may be better known as a mezzo-soprano but perhaps won’t be for long.

Stravinsky got the idea for his only full-length opera when he saw the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s famous series of satirical paintings tracking the downfall of a free-living young man. He asked his friend Aldous Huxley to suggest a poet for the verse libretto he wanted; Huxley suggested W.H. Auden, who accepted instantly, and soon this "lovable bloodhound" (as Stravinsky called him) visited the composer in LA. This was to be a moral fable, in the style of an 18th-century "numbers" opera, like something by Mozart, with independent arias, ensembles, and recitatives rather than a Wagnerian musical continuum. The "great progressives," like Gluck, Wagner, and Berg, Stravinsky wrote, "sought to abolish or transform most of the very clichés I have tried to re-establish."

Auden and his partner, poet Chester Kallman, worked closely with Stravinsky, and they produced one of opera’s most literate librettos — elegant, funny, and extremely poignant, qualities not lost on conductor Hoose or director Torgove. At the heart of the performance was some of the most stylish, atmospheric, and moment-to-moment sympathetic orchestral playing this town has heard. And in the literal midst of the players were a number of raised platforms representing the garden, the whorehouse, the townhouse, the graveyard (like the one in Don Giovanni), and the madhouse where the action takes place. A splendid chorus played "roaring boys," whores, outraged townspeople, eager bidders for the remains of the hero Tom Rakewell’s estate after he loses everything, and Rakewell’s roommates in Bedlam.

Tenor William Hite was appropriately callow in his interpretation, with singing that was sophisticated and authoritative, as the increasingly dissipated and disillusioned Rakewell. The warm-toned soprano Jennifer Foster, who sings at the Christian Science Mother Church, was an appealing Anne Truelove, Rakewell’s steadfast, upstanding, and forgiving fiancée, who refuses to abandon him on his downward slide into degradation and madness. Bass Mark Andrew Cleveland raised concerned objections as her sensible father. Mezzo Majie Zeller, as Mother Goose, the whorehouse keeper (an Auden invention), and bass Benjamin Cole, the madhouse keeper, were dandy in smaller roles.

Three singers stole the show whenever they appeared. Baritone David Kravitz has been on the way up for some years now. He’s sung major Mozart roles (including both Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello) with small companies, as well as numerous Bach and Handel parts. But as the Mephistophelean Nick Shadow, he came into his own. His voice has blossomed, his comic timing has sharpened, and with his goatee and magic tricks (there’s evidently more than one card up his sleeve) and fire-engine-red tie and pocket handkerchief, he was the Devil incarnate. Versatile tenor Frank Kelley (I heard him last as the Evangelist in Emmanuel Music’s Bach Christmas Oratorio), looking like a mop-haired Gyro Gearloose, was a mercury-tongued auctioneer Sellem in the opera’s most memorable throwaway scene. And mezzo-soprano Janice Felty was surely the most glamorous Baba the Turk in the history of this opera, looking like a hirsute Ava Gardner as the bearded lady whom Shadow talks Rakewell into marrying, and who emerges from her doomed marriage with infinite dignity ("I shall go back and grace the stage," she sings).

I don’t know whether it was an artistic or a budgetary decision not to have supertitles. It’s probably harder to get colorful and rhythmically complex literary English across to an English-speaking audience than it is the Italian of Mozart or Verdi. Diction was uniformly good (Kravitz’s, Felty’s, and Kelly’s all better than that), but it was a shame to miss so many of the words — though that’s probably not why many people during the intermission of the second performance told me they were back after having already heard the first one.