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Sherman then joined Byun on the same piano for an astonishing, heartbreaking performance of Schubert’s sublime F-minor Fantasy. The tempo was a little slower than usual, so every moment was more telling. In the opening theme, an "almost-grace-note" triggers a poignant ascent from C to F. When Byun played it, she leaned into that little note, giving it almost equal emphasis — and the difference made that reach upward immeasurably more piercing, more heartfelt. Even more than the Schumann, this piece grows larger and larger in scope — becomes both more personal and more universal. Schubert moves outward from the self to the social world, a dream of dancing, then hits another moment of crisis, in which the opening theme returns like a closing door. We survive this crisis, accept the tragic, may even be transformed by it as the theme comes back in a major key. It’s like hearing the music of the spheres. But there’s no escape. In the last pages, the main theme returns in its original, crushing sorrow. Byun and Sherman clearly understood — and felt — the significance of these turning points. They knew what was at stake: how beauty makes tragedy more bearable, how finding that connection between beauty and tragedy diminishes neither the beauty nor the tragedy. The performance moved me to tears.

The second half began with Debussy’s own two-piano transcription of his Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune. Byun began with a magically slow, languorous unfolding that led into Sherman’s darting arpeggios. So many scintillating details and swelling climaxes, all leading to the same point of erotic repose.

What could follow this mysterious, rich atmosphere? How about George Gershwin’s most complex orchestral score, the exhilarating three-movement Concerto in F — here perhaps more revealing of Gershwin’s harmonic inventiveness than the orchestral version. Sherman has a terrific recording of this on which he’s conducted by Gunther Schuller; he comes to the slow, bluesy romantic theme from the inside — that is, like a New Yorker. But I wouldn’t have guessed Byun could really boogie. She can!

Countless bouquets were heaped on the stage. The encore was surely the piece that best expressed the occasion: a celebration of how Byun and Sherman still feel about each other after 30 years — "Embraceable You." After the Schubert, it was the most touching moment on the program.

"WHAT I’M SINGING ABOUT is what I’m doing!" Frederica von Stade jokingly lamented. The beloved mezzo-soprano had a memory lapse and began her final solo number, Stephen Sondheim’s "Send In the Clowns," with the last verse instead of the first: "Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer?/Losing my timing this late in my career." At 59, she hasn’t lost much, or at least she knows exactly what she can do with what she’s got left. This was her fifth recital for the FleetBoston Celebrity Series since 1981, and this time she was sharing the Symphony Hall stage with a friend and fellow Metropolitan Opera star, 62-year-old bass Samuel Ramey.

Ramey is less secure about what he can still do. His Purcell and Handel were effortful and unstylish. He bludgeoned Cole Porter’s love song "Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye" with his overweight sound (and turned Porter’s piquant internal rhyme — "Yet how strange the change/From major to minor" — into the stiff "how great the change"). Four Charles Ives songs worked much better for him. So did his encore, "Old Man River," though he didn’t do much beyond the generic with Oscar Hammerstein’s greatest lyric.

Stade’s Fauré set was exquisite, and the Sondheim, once she got on track, was affecting in its gilt-edged beauty, nuanced delivery, even eloquent body language (her little shrug on "Sorry, my dear"). Her encore, the drinking song from Offenbach’s La périchole, was hilarious — who’d have guessed that a rolled "r" could be a sign of inebriation? A set of fanciful Songs to the Moon (Fairy-tales for the Children) written for her in 1998 by Jake Heggie (composer of the Dead Man Walking opera), with poems by Vachel Lindsay, owed too much to better composers like Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Paul Bowles; still, she pulled out every stop to put them across.

She and Ramey are obviously fond of each other. Yet their program included only two duets, in both of which they alternated verses: Copland’s "I Bought Me a Cat" ("This next song took years of vocal preparation," Stade announced, before the series of barnyard imitations) and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "People Will Say We’re in Love" (in which she had another memory slip). Their voices combined only in the very last line of each song. The one true duet was the final encore, "Là ci darem la mano," the seduction duet from Don Giovanni — the one number people applauded both before and after. But the biggest hand of all went to Warren Jones, their supple and supportive accompanist, who worked at least twice as hard as either of the stars.

IT WAS HARD TO CHOOSE between Boston Baroque’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine and the Cantata Singers’ evening of religious works for chorus and orchestra. I picked the latter because I could at least listen to the fine Boston Baroque recording (Jeffrey Gantz’s review of the performance is in "Live and on Record," on page 20). When would I get another chance to hear Paul Hindemith’s sizzling setting of the pre-mediæval abecedarian paraphrase from Matthew, Apparebit repentina dies ("The day will suddenly appear"), for chorus and brilliant brass, or Bruckner’s calmly fervent Mass in E, for chorus and winds, along with Schütz’s exuberant, heavenly 1619 setting of the musical Psalm 150? Despite the overreverberant, muddying acoustics of Cambridge’s First Congregational Church, David Hoose led performances that were close to perfection. During these times of spiritual mayhem and unholy wars, it’s a relief to be put back in touch, through music, with such direct, uncompromised spiritual affirmations.