E-Mail This Article to a Friend Welcome back Yo-Yo Ma, James Levine, and Winsor Music BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

There couldn’t have been fewer people on the Symphony Hall stage or more people in the audience. Yo-Yo Ma was playing three of Bach’s six suites for solo cello to a sold-out crowd for the opening night of the Bank of Boston Celebrity Series. These are probably the works he is most identified with — the last time he did them in Boston he played the entire cycle on two successive nights at the much cozier Jordan Hall. And yet the subtlety of his phrasing, his unforced ability to project, and his personal power of communication turned Symphony Hall into a large living room with lots of guests, but an intimate occasion nonetheless.

To hear Ma at his best these days, you pretty much have to hear him alone. His loyalty to his most frequent collaborators is estimable, and yet — pianist Peter Serkin is the exception that comes readiest to mind — few of them equal his mercurial and searching flexibility.

Ma seemed to choose the three suites — Suite No. 3 in C Major, No. 5 in C Minor, and No. 6 in D Major — with an ear for variety and contrasts. He played his 1733 Mantagnana, which has an edgier, more nasal sound than his richer, chocolaty Stradivarius. But he was playing more for complex rhythmic articulation and intricate layers of mood than just for tonal beauty. And where the music needed to be beautiful, it was plenty beautiful.

The C Major suite might have been the most familiar piece, since it’s the one on which Ma collaborated with choreographer Mark Morris (who called his dance Falling Down Stairs). The Prélude begins with a large annunciation, veers off into a more personal kind of musing (not without some irony), then builds to an intense buzz, with a big finish (which triggered a round of applause — Ma’s later, more tempered gesturing kept this end-of-movement interruption from recurring). The dances that followed — buoyant Allemande; forward-leaping, flowing Courante; meditative Sarabande; a double Bourrée, in major-minor dialogue with itself; and jaunty Gigue (in English: "jig") — became the templates, the archetypes, against which we could measure the surprising variants Bach could wring from similar dance movements in the later suites.

In the C Minor (with the A string tuned down a notch), everything is darker, quieter, more thoughtful, more melancholy, and more stately —except for the hummingbirdlike fast section of the final Gigue, perhaps the most brilliant moment in all the suites. The D Major was composed for an instrument with five strings, compounding the challenges for the player of a standard four-string cello — challenges Ma met with seeming effortlessness. Coming after the darker-toned C Minor, and after intermission, the D Major was all elegance, delicacy, and playfulness, though both the polyphony and the harmonies are more complex, the rhythms more syncopated.

For all the contrasts, the endless nuances of phrasing ("God is in the details!"), Ma never lost a central pulse. Three pieces for solo cello — one player, one instrument; yet what a fulfilling experience—series of experiences: powerful, delightful, seductive, and moving.

Three encores followed: Mark O’Connor’s floaty Appalachia, a yearning Mongolian folk tune ("Summer in the High Grassland"), both picking up on some of the folk elements in the Bach, and (Ma put his thumb and forefinger together for one last "little" piece) the lively, familiar opening Prèlude of the Suite No. 1.

A weekend later, James Levine, beginning his second season directing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, inaugurated the orchestra’s 125th season with a varied, enjoyable, and enlivening evening of French music, one of the BSO’s great traditions. This was a happy idea. At a preconcert press conference, Levine said he didn’t want to repeat what he’d done last season, which opened with one of the major monuments of Western music, Mahler’s heaven-storming Eighth Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand. This time, we got four less demanding, more purely entertaining pieces, mostly by rebels and innovators, expressing the remarkable diversity of 19th- and 20th-century French culture: Berlioz’s flamboyant High Romantic and heroic Le Corsaire Overture, suggested by Byronic adventures (1852); Debussy’s insinuating and coolly erotic "poème dansé" Jeux (1912), commissioned by Diaghilev for a ballet choreographed and danced by Nijinsky about a tennis "threesome"; Milhaud’s irresistibly rhythmic, sit-still-if-you-can tribute to Brazilian sambas, Le boeuf sur le toit ("The Ox on the Roof" —the title of a popular song Milhaud discovered in Rio [1919]); and Saint-Saëns’s grand Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, the orgasmic Organ Symphony (1886), guest organist Simon Preston giving Symphony Hall’s newly refurbished organ a splendid workout.

The Berlioz started with a bang, alternating shivering rapid-note exhilaration with soaring melody. All evening, the brasses excelled. The Milhaud is practically a trumpet concerto — Thomas Rolfs at the center of the frequently returning rondo section (this is one of the few tunes in the piece actually invented by Milhaud). Controversial principal trumpet Charles Schlueter, who didn’t play at the opening concert, has evidently announced his retirement at the end of the 2006 Tanglewood season. The Saint-Saëns is a crowd pleaser, not making excessive intellectual demands and leaning heavily on Liszt, Beethoven, and Schubert (the ominously stealthy beginning of the Unfinished Symphony is a major motif), but also artful and compelling, with the organ making the whole hall vibrate even before its climactic thundering outburst.

For my money, the masterpiece on the program was Jeux, which Levine had never led before — because it’s a hard piece to place on a program, not because he doesn’t love it. He says he learned it from Pierre Boulez, who has been its longtime champion. Debussy evidently didn’t like Nijinsky’s choreography, yet he’s filled the score with suggestive and teasing details lurking behind luminous veils of sound, until the "game" erupts into a lubricious waltz (Debussy, let’s not forget, composed the most famous French waltz, La valse). Levine got the orchestra to capture both Debussy’s mysterious evanescence and the harder-core emotional volleying. It was a triumph — perhaps more dramatic if not more ravishing or unsettling than Boulez. The entire concert was a triumph of technical bravura and inspired planning.

At the press conference, BSO manager Mark Volpe announced two new marketing strategies for the "harder"— and harder-sell—contemporary pieces Levine is committed to conducting: the maestro himself will do the preconcert talks (his passion is infectious), and anyone who wants to come back for a second hearing can exchange a ticket stub at the box office for another ticket at half price — if any seats are left.

Oboist Peggy Pearson’s Winsor Music opened its season at Lexington’s Follen Church with an appealing work in a fresh context — Brahms’s big Opus 11 Serenade for Orchestra, in a reconstruction close to Brahms’s original conception for nine string and wind instruments (using the later combination of oboe and clarinet rather than the original two clarinets). The performance was warm, vigorous, and utterly endearing, with a stellar ensemble including Neil Deland, particularly outstanding on the horn (Brahms’s dappled-light-and-shadows includes a lot of hunting music). A special treat came between movements, when Emmanuel Music’s Craig Smith talked feelingly about Brahms’s life, especially about the young composer’s relationship with the Schumanns, Robert (whom he admired above all other living composers) and Clara (whom he adored all his life). This made a relatively short but thoroughly satisfying evening, because Smith’s touching words illuminated the music without lecturing and because the playing was so eloquent. We didn’t need to hear more.