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THE LAST CONCERT in Emmanuel Music’s series "John Harbison and His World" was devoted to song cycles. It opened with six selections from Book I of one of Harbison’s earliest and most ambitious works, Mottetti di Montale, his four-part setting of Montale’s moving series of edge-of-the-war poems (1939) — poems of love, separation, and personal loss in a world whose center cannot hold. Harbison is intricately responsive to the text, and though his later version with chamber orchestra is ravishing, I prefer the earlier version, which challenges the pianist to do what an orchestra can do with ease.

The cycle’s first singer, back in 1980, was mezzo-soprano Janice Felty. Her theater work with Peter Sellars and ART has surely contributed to her own increasing responsiveness to texts, and this performance at Emmanuel Church, with pianist Judith Gordon playing that orchestra-of-ivories, was eloquently detailed, consistently revealing, and very moving, though even well-chosen selections don’t have the impact of a complete section, let alone the full hour-long cycle.

Thinking about which composers ought to be included in the "and his world" aspect of the series, Harbison regretted the omission of Bartók. So Felty and Gordon came up with an early, eerie setting of folk-like Hungarian poems of nature, love, and death by Endre Ady, Five Songs, Opus 16. These were evidently new to just about everyone present, including Harbison himself — and it was good to remedy that unjust neglect.

Flashes and Illuminations, a cycle Harbison has reworked since it was commissioned for Sanford Sylvan and his long-time accompanist David Breitman a decade ago, includes another Montale poem (in Harbison’s own translation), two poems by Elizabeth Bishop, and one each by William Carlos Williams, Harbison’s poet/art-critic friend Michael Fried, and Polish Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The marvelous "Cirque d’hiver" was, Harbison told us, the poem that first got him hooked on Bishop. Poignantly sung by Sylvan, it’s one of Harbison’s most beautiful songs, reflecting both the elegance of the little mechanical horse "with real white hair" who "bears a little dancer on his back" and the elegance of Bishop’s interwoven rhymes. The toy is Bishop’s image of the busywork of creation, and Harbison’s music captures both its innocence and Bishop’s desperation. I’m still wrestling with the structure of the full cycle.

The program ended with the Harbison cycle I feel closest to, since it includes two unpublished Bishop poems I had the good fortune to find. North and South (the title comes from Bishop’s first book, North & South) is a symmetrically constructed series of six "musical" poems — four of them have the word "song" in the title, one is about listening to love songs on the radio. Each of the two "Books" begins with one of Bishop’s "Songs for a Colored Singer" (Harbison calls them "Ballads for Billie" because Bishop had hoped Billie Holiday might record them). Each is followed by a brief and mysterious interlude, then by a darker, more soulful love song. It’s one of Harbison’s most immediately appealing works, with suggestions of blues, a haunting waltz, and unsentimental but pervasive melody.

Felty sang with comic élan ("I met him walking with Varella/and hit him twice with my umbrella") and multifaceted prisms of feeling ("Last night I slept with you./Today I love you so/how can I bear to go/(as soon I must, I know)/to bed with ugly death/in that cold, filthy place/to sleep there without you"). In "Late Air," Gordon’s scintillating arpeggios seemed pulled "from a magician’s midnight sleeve"; in "Dear, my compass still points north," you could hear the icicles forming high up the keyboard.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Jeffrey Rink, music director of Chorus pro Musica and Concert Opera Boston, was singing in the chorus of the celebrated New York City Opera production of Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele, with bass-baritone Norman Treigle in the title role. Ever since, he’s wanted to lead his own performance. This season, he finally got his wish.

Boito is justly admired as the librettist for Verdi’s last two operas, Otello and Falstaff. He wanted to be a composer, too, and Mefistofele, which is based on Goethe’s Faust, was his only completed opera — a flop that after extensive revision he turned into a success. It’s not often done in this country, but one aria remains widely known, the one the demented Margherita — having been seduced by Faust — sings when she is imprisoned for the death of her baby and her mother. The recording by Maria Callas is chilling. But a lot of Boito’s music is awkward, inflated, hard to sing, and uninspired — though it’s impossible to imagine Iago’s "Credo," that aria of total moral denial Boito added to Shakespeare, without Mefistofele’s "Son lo spirito che nega."

Rink and his chorus and orchestra pulled off a full-hearted, vigorous, and exciting concert performance. Nothing too subtle or understated here, but the opera itself doesn’t make those kinds of demands. It really needs a bigger venue than Jordan Hall — everything sounded too loud. The soloists were often pushed into uncomfortable volumes, though that was part of the fun. For such a relatively obscure opera, it was too bad there were no supertitles.

In the title role, Raymond Aceto had both a commanding presence and plenty of poise, so his persistent irony was thoroughly convincing. Even at his considerable loudest, his strong voice didn’t sound forced. He even whistled! Tenor Allan Glassman, as Faust, sounded more effortful than he did when he sang Otello under Rink four years ago. For better or worse, he never stopped "acting," though everything he did was intelligently motivated. His stentorian high notes could easily have filled the Metropolitan Opera House (and they do), but I yearned for occasional delicacy.

Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo was more problematic. She has a pretty and, when she gets it into focus, an impressive voice. But she seemed hopeless as an actress. She sang everything — love duets, an aria in which she is losing her mind — in her dual roles as innocent peasant girl and Helen of Troy with her feet planted firmly apart (to help control her stomach muscles?). In Margherita’s big aria, "L’altra notte in fondo al mare" ("The other night into the depths of the sea"), she completely missed Boito’s alternations between Margherita’s horror at what has happened and her escape into insanity.

Mezzo-soprano Gail Fuller was witty and sexy as Margherita’s neighbor, Martha, and Lithuanian mezzo Danute Mileika was an elegant Pantalis in the act dealing with classical myth (which had some of the most refined orchestral work, including Martha Moor’s enchanting harp solo). Up in the balcony, the NEC Children’s Choruses and the Treble Chorus of New England were perfect angels.