Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (Bah-REESE Gahdoo-NOFF) is a rare treat in Boston, though back in 1965, Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston presented the American premiere of Mussorgsky’s original version of his masterpiece — the most national of Russia’s national operas. As the tormented turn-of-the-16th-century tsar, Caldwell had the great Canadian bass George London. Then she scheduled it again the following season, with the great Bulgarian Boris, Boris Christoff. The opera was last seen in Boston on a Met tour, nearly 25 years ago.

Last week Teatro Lirico d’Europa, the touring company based in Bulgaria that has won Boston hearts with its rough-and-ready productions of Verdi and Puccini, brought Boris for two nights (plus Madama Butterfly; see Jeffrey Gantz’s review at www.bostonphoenix.com). Teatro Lirico’s Boston home — the Emerson Majestic Theatre — is still under renovation, so we had a concert version at Jordan Hall, semi-staged by company director Giorgio Lalo, with elaborate costumes, fake beards and wigs, two chairs by way of scenery, and typo-ridden supertitles ( " Easy my tormented heard with words of affection " ). I didn’t miss the scenery. I hope we don’t have to wait another quarter of a century for another performance this powerful.

Boris combines the historical sweep and grandeur of Verdi’s Don Carlo with the folk elements (especially folk songs) and sense of community of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. It’s also a musicological can of worms. Mussorgsky never lived to see his original conception produced; five years later he made extensive revisions, adding significant new scenes, including a major role for a woman and a love story. After his death, his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov revised, reorchestrated, and glamorized it to make it more acceptable to a tradition-bound opera audience. It’s gorgeous, and it works — though it lacks Mussorgsky’s harmonic rawness. Other composers have also taken a shot at " correcting " Mussorgsky’s austere orchestration. Although Rimsky’s version is rarely done here anymore, it’s still common in Europe — and that’s what Teatro Lirico brought, minus some important scenes, including scenes of complex motivations (a character listed in the program booklet’s plot synopsis was completely omitted) and the poignant scenes with the Simpleton, which confirm that the real hero of the opera is less the guilt-ridden ruler who murdered the royal heir in order to get the throne (a Russian Richard III) than it is the People of Russia.

But what a sizzling performance this was! Metodi Matakiev, the director of the Bulgarian Radio Orchestra, gave it a surging sweep, building tremendous choral climaxes, yet holding back for scenes of intimacy — or comedy. He gave the church music an eerie sense of ancient otherworldliness. He let the folk songs lilt like folk songs, the dances skip like dances. The mazurkas and the polonaise in the Polish scene had a different character from the music evoking the Russian spirit. The orchestra gave him what he wanted, and the 33-member chorus of arguing peasants, boyars, and gossiping ladies of the Polish court gave him even more. The walls vibrated with their overwhelming sound and vivid characterizations.

The current tour includes five operas, so these singers, performing together almost every night, have developed a rare sense of ensemble. The soloists, who include two basses and two tenors from the Bolshoi Opera, ranged from competent to magnificent. Bolshoi tenor Lev Kuznetsev was too old and barrel-chested to make a convincingly dashing " false Dimitri " (the sly — or deluded — monk pretending to be the real pretender to the throne), but he could pump out a tremendous volume of convincing sound. Especially in his scene with the calculating, self-absorbed Polish princess Marina, who was superbly sung and acted with satiric flair by the attractive young Bulgarian mezzo Elena Marinova (she was stuck in the middle of a huge white pearl-encrusted gown of many huge hoops — like Carol Burnett in her parody of Gone with the Wind).

Bolshoi tenor Anatoly Zaychenko, vocally thinner, was nevertheless an effectively oily Prince Shuiski (the tsar’s closest and most dangerous advisor). Basso Dimiter Stantchev, from the Sofia National Opera, was an uninhibitedly Falstaffian Varlaam, the hard-drinking monk who sings the famous song about the Ivan the Terrible’s siege of Kazan. And the appealing comic tenor Milko Mihaylov, with less to sing, never fell out of character as his drunken pal, Missail. Soprano Rumyana Petrova was a lively inn-keeperess.

But most remarkable were the two Bolshoi basses alternating as Boris and the visionary monk Pimen. Huge Vyacheslav Pochapsky had a voice that seemed to emanate from the bottom of a well — dark, resonant, mysteriously deep, a bit rough-edged. And Russian to the core. His wide, expressive mouth seemed to taste every syllable. He could be tender with his children, enraged with Shuisky, and both commanding and tormented as the monarch. The coronation scene and his death scene were overwhelming. It was surely a performance in the tradition of the legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin.

Alexander Kissilev’s Pimen had a more elegant vocal technique — I wanted to hear him in Verdi — and a subtler, more modern style of acting. I felt an almost mystical presence. The following night, he was a more inward Boris, torn apart to the point of madness, though he was less imposing a ruler than Pochapsky. Although Pochapsky sang with nobility and passion as Pimen, he was less convincing, less detailed in his characterization. Still, Teatro Lirico brought us not just one but two sensational singers in one of the greatest of all operatic roles and a riveting experience of one of the greatest of all operas.

SOME OTHER RECENT MUSICAL EVENTS weren’t chopped liver either. Donald Teeters’s Boston Cecilia presented a moving evening of Brahms, beginning with an energized and witty Academic Festival Overture and then going on to, in a joint venture with Coro Allegro (David Hodgkins, director), two major works for chorus and solo singers, the Alto Rhapsody (a setting for alto and male chorus of Goethe’s all-too-timely poem of prayer for re-entry into the bosom of human society, " Winter Journey through the Harz Mountains " ) and Ein deutsches Requiem, a decidedly non-liturgical setting, not in Latin but in Luther’s vernacular translation of Biblical texts dealing with mourning and hope (this was Cecilia’s first Brahms Requiem since the group presented the Boston, premiere in 1888).

Mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal was the eloquent, quick-study last-minute replacement in the Rhapsody, singing with warmth of feeling, verbal particularity, and richness of tone (I can’t wait to hear her sing this again, perhaps with even more flow in the sudden leaps and descents of Brahms’s quirky melodic line). Soprano Karol Bennett, once a Boston staple, made a welcome return, singing with radiant conviction that consolation for loss is possible. And how reassuring to be reminded of both our mortality and the possibility of something beyond the mortal by one of Boston’s most treasurable artists, baritone Robert Honeysucker. The collaborating choruses and orchestra performed with buoyant fervor, rising to the challenge of Teeters’s broad, spacious tempos, and helped immeasurably by his clarity of textures and rhythmic incisiveness.

IT’S BEEN 17 YEARS since Pierre Boulez conducted a BSO program, but his disciple and successor as leader of the Ensemble InterContemporain, David Robertson, was back for his third Boston gig, and he led three 20th-century pieces right up Boulez’s alley: Luciano Berio’s famous/notorious sound collage Sinfonia (its first BSO subscription performance), Debussy’s enigmatic Jeux (from 1913, his last orchestral work), and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (the 1919 version with reduced orchestra) — works all memorably recorded by Boulez.

Berio completed the Sinfonia in 1968, then added a cyclical fifth movement in 1969. It still causes a stir with its breathtaking appropriation in its central movement of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony (as well as sneaky quotations from Ravel’s La valse, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony, and Berio’s own music) and its eight amplified voices (originally the Swingle Singers, this time the impressive British group Synergy Vocals), with their buried, barely audible recitations of Beckett ( " the moment has come for us to look back " ; " the unexpected is always upon us " ), Joyce, Levi-Strauss, political graffiti, riffs on the phrase " O Martin Luther King, " and a personal " thank you " to whoever happens to be conducting. Robertson more than navigated the kaleidoscopic orchestration. His high energy also had a glittering delicacy and transparency. This was a lively and shapely undertaking, hard to resist.

Jeux ( " games " ) — " Poème dansé " — was composed for a ballet choreographed by Nijinsky about a tennis threesome (the original idea was for three men, but it ended up being a man and two women). Whatever ambiguity existed in Nijinsky’s mind about the interconnection of the erotic and the athletic was certainly captured in Debussy’s seductive and elusive score, a continuously unfolding waltz that both evolves out of and dissolves back into luminous darkness, with diaphanous harps, teasing tambourine taps, and a dizzying, louche climax led by an aroused trombone (played with graphic urgency and élan by Ron Barron). The BSO hasn’t programmed it in 21 seasons, but the players seemed to know it like the back of their hands.

As they did the more familiar Firebird Suite, which includes the most important music from Stravinsky’s first big hit (1910), the dazzling and flickering orchestral colors by way of Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy — and like Jeux, it was commissioned by Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes. Richard Svoboda’s magical bassoon in the Lullaby and James Sommerville’s imaginative horn in the Finale must share first prize here, but except for Keisuke Wakao’s glutinous oboe solo, pretty much the entire orchestra gets a G for gorgeousness.

If we have to do without the master himself, then this was the next best thing.

FEW SCENES IN OPERA are more foolproof than the murder of Baron Scarpia, chief of the Roman secret police circa 1800, at the hands of the diva Floria Tosca, whose lover he’s been threatening to execute unless she gives in to his lecherous advances. It’s the most shocking scene in Puccini’s Tosca, which musicologist Joseph Kerman once famously called " that shabby little shocker. " But the Boston Academy of Music/Opera Providence " multi-media " production managed to ruin it. During the suspenseful hush that follows the murder, stage director Joseph Bascetta, artistic director of the Fresno International Opera Company, and/or set designer Janie Howland decided to change the background image — from reproductions of the Caracci frescoes in the Farnese Palace to some evidently symbolic but unidentifiable abstraction. It wasn’t just the noisy slide projector that shattered the mood.

Not much real drama preceded this damaging miscalculation. The problem was mostly the leading lady. The Sardou play on which Puccini based his opera was written for Sarah Bernhardt. Tosca is a vehicle for either a great singing actress, like Maria Callas or Magda Olivero, or a soprano with a glorious voice, like Leontyne Price.

But Lori Phillips, who has sung many major roles in regional opera and is about to sing Turandot at New York City Opera, was neither. Her voice is huge but not varied, beautifully lyrical, or consistently focused. Why was she shouting all the time, even in a church? She was so loud at the beginning of the second act that by the time she was supposed to get desperate enough to stab Scarpia, her volume level had long since peaked. And though she dutifully went through the blocking, I didn’t for a second believe her. Her hauteur seemed studied, her coyness painfully arch, her passion only playacting. How horrified could she have been by Scarpia’s proposition if she seemed more worried about smearing her make-up when she carefully clapped her hands to her face? To her credit, at the very end, she made a terrific suicide leap off the Castel Sant’Angelo — her arms raised in triumph.

Before the shake-up in BAM’s administration, soprano Ellen Chickering had been announced as the Tosca, probably her operatic farewell. A loyal friend, she dropped out when BAM founder Richard Conrad, who was supposed to stage Tosca, was removed as artistic director by his own board. Chickering is not the most subtle actress, but she never sang a note that wasn’t sincere. Phillips rang hollow. She had no center. And so the opera itself had no center.

A couple of good performances, though, came to the rescue. BAM veteran tenor Ray Bauwens made the artist and republican Cavaradossi, Tosca’s lover, one of his best roles. Bauwens has a sizable, extremely focused voice. It’s often too loud or too tight. But he has conviction and an appealing earnestness inside that heroic ring. In his third-act aria, " E lucevan le stelle " ( " And the stars were shining " ), a heartbroken outcry against dying when he is so much in love, he scaled back, and the aria became unusually touching.

As Scarpia, baritone René de la Garza, who directs the opera program at the University of Rhode Island, had the thinnest voice of the three principals, but he had style. He came close, as many Scarpias do, to curled-lip caricature, but an essential elegance kept him from going over the edge.

A few giggles always keep one alert. Puccini made it awkward for Scarpia to remain on stage during Tosca’s one big soliloquy, " Vissi d’arte " ( " I lived for art " ), but when de la Garza exited carrying a candle, he looked as if he were heading for the loo. And should Tosca, frantically searching Scarpia’s desk for her safe-conduct pass, be hurling his papers clear across the stage?

Northeastern University’s grim Blackman Theatre, which BAM has been using this year while the Emerson Majestic Theatre is being renovated, has no pit, so the orchestra is always too loud, and singers have to force their voices in dry and unflattering acoustics. Howland’s projections helped create an illusion of depth, but the narrow stage still seemed cluttered and claustrophobic — and the images of Rome were too much like postcards. Characters had to go down five steps in both church and palace — Scarpia’s apartment had such a sunken living room, he could have flooded it and used it as a swimming pool.

Paul Phillips, director of the Brown University Orchestra, maundered through the climactic second act. The playing was unsettled but proficient. Probably some newcomers enjoyed this old warhorse, but — as opposed to most of what BAM has produced over 22 years — no artistic motive was in evidence. At least Puccini might help pay for the nobly ambitious week of contemporary operas that’s planned for June.