Philosopher and critic Theodore Adorno described Gustav Mahler’s music as " turning cliché into event. " Michael Steinberg quotes this in his program note on Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, which was the biggest work on the program led by the BSO’s principal guest conductor, Bernard Haitink, in the first of his two weeks in Boston this season. If you wanted to be mean, you could say that Haitink often turns event into . . . if not exactly cliché, then at least non-event. The most " eventful " performance of the Mahler Fourth is a recording conducted by one of Mahler’s most ardent champions and disciples, Willem Mengelberg, whom Haitink eventually succeeded as music director of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra.

The very greatest performances for me are the ones in which, no matter how well you know the music, what comes next is always a surprise. That feeling of suspense and discovery is an indication that the performer is engaging with the music, living through it. That’s what I hear when I listen to the legendary recordings of pianist Artur Schnabel, violinist Joseph Szigeti, cellist Pablo Casals, oboist Leon Goossens, or horn player Dennis Brain. Or conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, and Pierre Boulez. Or soprano Maria Callas, to name perhaps the most obvious example. It’s one of the things that was so thrilling about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performance of Dido in last week’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. This is accomplished when a musician recognizes that a transition in the music — a change of key or rhythm or color — means something new. So it becomes, in Adorno’s phrase, an event. A landmark. A turning point.

And it’s the most important thing that Haitink usually lacks. His performance of Mozart’s exhilarating Haffner Symphony had exhilaration all right — it was lively and fast — but it remained uneventful, and dull, because he treated each turning point as if it were completely expected: this happens, then this happens. The tail end of the opening phrase went limp at the very place it should have exploded. So the performance, well played as it was, seemed pedestrian, because Haitink seemed to be walking through it. I wasn’t looking for a heart-on-sleeve outpouring of sentiment (there are plenty of those) — just one in which something was always holding my attention.

The one moment that did come to life was the string theme that follows the opening sleigh bells of the Mahler. Haitink got the orchestra to have an attitude: a feeling of affection for that violin theme — nostalgia, longing. But the sense that a musical moment had some special meaning never returned. The performance was lovely, played with taste and refinement, but the slow movement was a little too fast to make its most powerful impression, and the climax became a gratuitous noisy contrast rather than a visionary experience that grew out of what preceded it. The symphony might just as well have been by Richard Strauss at his most syrupy and earthbound, not Mahler’s childlike and ecstatic vision of Heaven. The one crucial player we could take for granted to express emotion was oboist John Ferillo — maybe because he comes to the BSO from James Levine’s Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which every night has to tell a story.

The soprano in the last movement of the Mahler was supposed to be Dorothea Röschmann, a new Mozart star I couldn’t wait to hear. But she was ill. Her replacement was another excellent singer, Ana Maria Martinez, who’s been appearing with Andrea Bocelli and Plácido Domingo. Martinez can float a beautifully focused, dark-edged tone. She was effective — even passionate — in the Mozart concert aria " Ch’io mi scordi di te? " ( " You want me to forget you? " ), which Mozart wrote for Nancy Storace, the soprano who created the role of Susanna in Figaro, and with whom he might have been infatuated; he wrote a brilliant and caressing piano part for himself to accompany her. Here that part was performed by the scintillating Hungarian-born Klára Würtz, in her BSO debut. Too bad she didn’t get to play a concerto.

In the last movement of the Mahler, the soprano enters to sing in wide-eyed wonder of the saints cooking dinner in Heaven (Leonard Bernstein recorded this movement with a boy soprano), but Martinez didn’t capture the childlike innocence — or give the words any particularity at all. Her ripe voice, despite some exquisite quiet singing, remained " adult " and dourly serious, though St. Ursula herself is laughing and St. Cecilia is playing music that " gladdens our senses " and awakens us to joy.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN on Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s first visit to Boston, more than 20 years ago, when his early-music ensemble, Concentus Musicus of Vienna, was giving a free concert at Sanders Theatre. I loved the Concentus’s recordings, and I was eager to hear the group in person. But you needed tickets to get in, and they disappeared before I could get one. I was desperate. It was winter, but I left my coat at home, waited in the lobby until I stopped shivering, then told the ticket taker that I was already seated — my coat was obviously inside. It worked! And the concert was memorable.

Of all the conductors who have become famous for playing early music in an authentic style, Harnoncourt is the one who does later, Romantic music best — maybe because even in old music he never rushes the slow movements and always lets the music breathe. His 2001 and 2003 New Year’s Day concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic had the best Strauss waltzes since Carlos Kleiber’s concert in 1989. The dances were superbly articulated, stylish, and full of teasing rubato. Also touching. So I was delighted that in one of his rare appearances here (he avoids long flights) he was going to be playing Strauss with the Vienna Phil in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series.

Not just Johann but also his younger brother Josef, on a rather odd program: a group of Viennese overtures, waltzes, and polkas followed, after intermission, by Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony (in Cleveland it would be Schubert and Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák; in Philadelphia, Bruckner and Berg). Flouting chronology? Serving the desserts before the main course? Yes and no. This was a very intelligently conceived program, moving from music in a popular idiom back to music that uses popular idioms.

Harnoncourt started with the Overture to Johann’s operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig ( " A Night in Venice " ), which warned us that there were going to be no artificial " refinements " in this playing. Where the composer called for brassiness, we’d get plenty of brass, drums, and cymbals — big noise with a Near Eastern flavor (what city in Central Europe is more Byzantine than Venice?). When Pierre Boulez brought the Vienna Phil to Carnegie Hall two years ago (its last Boston gig was in 1993), I was struck by the depth of the orchestral sound — the three-dimensional layerings. And I felt this at Symphony Hall, too. Every section had air around it. Harnoncourt asked for — and got — an astonishing dynamic range, even within a phrase (episodes would reach a climax, then dissolve into impalpable atmosphere), and surprising rhythmic flexibility without losing the essential pulse. So every phrase built suspense or relaxed from it — there was always movement, some direction in which to go. And when the Overture sailed off into one of Strauss’s dreamiest slow waltzes, I felt caressed by the tenderness of both conductor and players.

The next two pieces, Johann’s lilting " French polka " Im Krapfenwaldl ( " In the Little Jelly-Doughnut Woods " ) and Josef’s most enchanting waltz, Dorfschwalben aus Österreich ( " Village Swallows from Austria " ), with its almost trancelike waves of melody, both use birdcalls: twittering machines (including a cuckoo whistle in the polka) that set us up for the " real " instruments — flutes (nightingale), oboes (quail), and clarinets (cuckoo) — that warble and coo at the end of Beethoven’s second-movement " Scene at the Brook. " For the Strausses, the birds are picturesque, adding touristic color to the orchestra.

To Beethoven, Nature was a kind of imaginative and spiritual Eden — the pastoral world, even with the threat of a thunderstorm (which erupts violently in the fourth movement), is a way of making contact with some life force beyond the human. Near the end of the Pastorale, in the shepherds’ " Happy and Grateful Feelings After the Storm, " the violins took on an ethereal sweetness — perhaps all the finer because first and second violins were on opposite sides of the conductor (they could answer each other, or one side could finish the other’s sentence), and all the sweeter for the full-hearted responses of the other instruments. Harnoncourt’s direct, angular gestures became circular, as if he could see in Beethoven’s design — the idea of renewal in Nature, the sense of eternal return — the wheeling of the universe itself. These ideas were surely what the conductor had in mind: the worldly, " modern " Strausses, with their images of Venice, their evenings in the Vienna woods, their awareness of science (the witty Elektromagnetische and speed-of-light Electrofor polkas), the dark tremolos triggering the pre-Freudian delirium of Josef’s Delirien waltz, in contrast to the otherworldly Beethoven, with his metaphysical countryside — though the village festivities in the Scherzo, with their unsophisticated country dances, sounded like a blast of a party.

Maybe Harnoncourt was overstating the connection between Beethoven and the Strausses; maybe some of the Beethoven (the rollicking Scherzo?) ended up sounding too much like Strauss; and maybe there was just too much Strauss (and not consistently on the highest level, though it’s all hard to play). But he led all the pieces — waltzes, polkas, even the explosive little Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák Slavonic Dance encore — as if they were always about something. So I always wanted to listen, and some things, like the time-suspended " Scene at the Brook " and that rising and falling slow waltz tune defying gravity itself in the Village Swallows, were so beautiful, I didn’t want them to end. Which is not always the case at Symphony Hall.