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ANOTHER SEXY MEZZO made her BSO debut last week: the German diva Waltraud Meier, who sang the Wesendonk-Lieder in a chronological all-Wagner program conducted by Edo de Waart. Earlier in the week, she and De Waart participated in a discussion about Wagner presented by the BSO and the Harvard Music Department — and mostly disagreed. She loved singing at the famous opera house at Bayreuth constructed specifically for Wagner. De Waart demurred, shocked that replacement players kept appearing at every rehearsal, and that some performances had almost no players with whom he’d rehearsed. This didn’t bother Meier because, as she said, those musicians had all played Wagner before anyway. The maestro complained that the orchestra in Munich refused to play a scene over again for a famous singer who was appearing as Wagner’s Ortrud for the first time. She should have done it elsewhere first, was the diva’s withering rejoinder.

The two artists were certainly more united at the performance. Meier’s voice has a burnished coppery glint that De Waart had the orchestra caress. Her approach to the ecstatic spirituality — or spiritualized ecstasy — of these poems written by the woman (not his wife) with whom Wagner (not her husband) was having a spiritually torrid relationship, was nevertheless restrained, even chilly. Unlike Susan Graham’s, Meier’s singing is not text-driven. At Harvard, she spoke out against supertitles because, she said, the text is "not only the carrier of the story — it is music itself. It helps not to really understand."

De Waart led off with a glowing performance of the Prelude to act one of Lohengrin (the music Charlie Chaplin, as the Hitler figure in The Great Dictator, uses for his sublime pas de deux with an inflated globe). The BSO strings couldn’t have sounded more radiant. Yet though this conductor is a master of the Wagnerian ebb and flow, even he couldn’t make consistently compelling the Dutch percussionist/composer Henk de Vlieger’s 70-minute-long arrangement of purple passages from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This so-called "Orchestral Adventure," from 1991 (dedicated to De Waart), reminded me of the critically reviled though extremely entertaining "symphonic syntheses" put together by Leopold Stokowski in the 1930s. But Stokie knew better than to keep an audience squirming for more than an hour without a break, and his "syntheses" were more dramatic than De Vlieger’s mechanical run-through of hit numbers in the order they turn up in the operas. He leaves out some of Wagner’s most beautiful music (like the entire first act of Die Walküre), and many of the transitions (like the sudden shift from the Ride of the Valkyries to the Magic Fire Music) seemed disjointed and arbitrary.

The most engaging moment was Siegfried’s extended hunting-horn solo as played by James Sommerville. He blatted one note, but his phrasing and the arresting echo effects were mesmerizing. The week before, De Waart closed his concert with a blazing version of Janácek’s Sinfonietta, one of the great pieces of music for a brass section, and the often troubled BSO brasses rose to the occasion. There’s plenty for the brasses in Wagner, too, but this time they sounded tired and strained, and De Waart’s balances tipped too much in their favor.

In an original programming move, the Janácek was preceded by a graceful, dreamy performance of Dvorák’s seldom played Piano Concerto, with elegant Pierre-Laurent Aimard making this difficult music sound easy, and a stunning and very moving rendition of Charles Ives’s Thanksgiving &/or Forefathers’ Day. In 1932, nearly 30 years after his original conception, Ives made this the final movement of his Holiday Symphony. It opens with a still-shocking, ear-blasting, mind-bending "polychord" in both C major and D minor. Ouch! — but don’t stop!

SPEAKING OF IVES: I forgot to mention in my comments on Andrew Rangell’s preview concert in Arlington two weeks back that the mysteriously shimmering new John McDonald piece he played as a kind of prelude to Ives’s Concord Sonata had been commissioned by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series for the April 3 Boston Marquee recital that he unfortunately has had to cancel for health reasons. And since one can never get too much Ives, I was happy to discover in Susan Graham’s bio that her next release will be a recital of Ives songs in which she’ll be accompanied by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (who stayed in Boston after his BSO gig to attend her recital).

I also neglected to say in my review of Opera Boston’s widely praised Nixon in China last week that it was a co-production with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. A Cutler Majestic Theatre snafu evidently resulted in someone’s tossing out cartons of programs before the second performance. More have now been printed at the theater’s expense. Anyone who didn’t get one can do so by calling Opera Boston at (617) 451-9944.

THERE WAS A MOMENT in the Cantata Singers’ latest performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that made me feel, along with the program annotator, that it was no exaggeration to call this "the greatest work of its kind ever composed, a milestone in Western civilization." The chorus is spitting at Christ, striking him in the face, mocking him. "Who is it that struck you?" they taunt. Suddenly, the same chorus becomes the voices of the sorrowing community and sings, in a beautiful chorale: "Who was it dared to strike you,/ My saviour . . . You are not a sinner/Like us." The idea that we are all guilty of making Christ suffer runs through this entire Passion. Just before the end, the bass soloist sings one of Bach’s most beautiful lullabies: "Make yourself, my heart, all pure,/I will entomb Jesus within myself." There’s no self-righteous "us" and no hateful "them." "We" are "them."

This sense of common guilt and suffering and yearning for forgiveness is, I gather, missing from one recent dramatization of the Gospel. Bach is a timely corrective.

The Cantata Singers, under the intense and heartfelt direction of David Hoose, have virtually defined this work for the Boston community: the dramatic pacing, the powerful intersection of chorus and soloist, the final tenderness — always delivered by an astounding chorus and orchestra. This year they were joined by the PALS Children’s Chorus, and the players included concertmaster Danielle Maddon, exceptional in the violin obbligato to the great alto aria "Erbarme dich" ("Have mercy"), Christopher Krueger (flute), Peggy Pearson (oboe), and the "speaking" continuo accompaniment of Beth Pearson (cello), Susan Hagen (bass), and Michael Beattie (organ).

Who’d have thought in 1988 that Lynn Torgove, as Barbarina, the pert kewpie doll in a mini-skirt in Le nozze di Figaro, would someday plumb the resonant depths of Bach’s profound alto solos? Her fellow soloists were the heavenly soprano Janet Brown, magnificent James Maddalena (heartbreaking in that last bass aria), Charles Blandy, Majie Zeller, Janna Baty, Mark Andrew Cleveland, and Douglas Williams as an especially good Pilate.

This year’s Evangelist was tenor William Hite, still suffering the after-effects of the cold that had forced Frank Kelley to take over two nights earlier. He made a powerful case for an Evangelist who responds with immediate pain to the events he’s narrating (as opposed to a more visionary one who understands the bigger picture). And David Kravitz was more an earthy, angry, even ironic Jesus than an otherworldly one. The music has room for these alternative interpretations. And as usual with these artists, there was nothing here that was not thought out or felt in the deepest way.