E-Mail This Article to a Friend Opening moves Daniele Gatti at the BSO, BMOP, Emmanuel’s Schumann, and the Chamber Orchestra of Boston BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Question: when is an opening night not an opening night? Answer: when the main attraction arrives three weeks later. And so, given James Levine’s commitments to the Metropolitan Opera this year, the official gala opening of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 124th season will take place on October 22, when its new music director conducts his first performance in his new capacity. In the meantime, we get three weeks of BSO concerts under other conductors. The first one, the one we can’t call "opening night," featured the young Italian conductor Daniele Gatti, who has led the BSO only once before, after health problems forced him to cancel on two other occasions.

No health problems were in evidence last Thursday: Gatti looked solid and powerful. (In the movie version, the young Al Pacino could have played him.) He was so confidently laid back in Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, the dark G-minor, he actually stopped conducting in places and just let the orchestra play. But in the Mahler Fifth that followed (also starting in a minor key but ending in a major), he threw himself bodily into the fray.

The Mozart was very centered — clearly structured, elegantly played, appropriately somber, though it lacked both the mystery and the nervous urgency of the greatest performances. Still, good middle-level BSO Mozart has been rare enough. And with the new seating plan that maestro Levine has instituted (first and second violins on opposite sides of the stage; cellos next to the firsts; basses behind the cellos), the airier, more refined orchestral sound, the cleaner musical lines and clearer harmonies, help defeat mush.

The first movement of the Mahler, a funeral march, probably could have benefitted from another rehearsal. The violent outbursts were uninhibited but coarse — and mushy — even with the new seating arrangement. The brasses were distressingly raucous. But the "stormy" second movement was more controlled — vigorous and exciting. Mahler’s impassioned "storm" alternates with one of his most ambiguous themes. Program annotator Stephen Ledbetter describes it as a "sorrowful march melody." To my mind, that march is also an insinuating and sinister tango; for Gatti, it was a kind of heart-on-sleeve love song.

In the long Scherzo, largely a waltz, Gatti’s use of rubato (the holding of a note or pause longer than it’s actually marked in the score) might be the wittiest I’ve ever heard in this symphony. The famous Adagietto was truly tender rather than lugubrious (Luchino Visconti used it as a premonition of doom on the soundtrack of Death in Venice), with tempos impressively flexible for this orchestra. Everything moved briskly along without seeming rushed. The finale built up a jolly head of steam that brought the audience to its feet. The performance missed the revelatory understanding of Mahler’s contrasts and thematic transformations that Michael Tilson Thomas and the visiting San Francisco Symphony demonstrated last spring (in the Bank of America Celebrity Series), but it was the real thing.

GIL ROSE’S Boston Modern Orchestra Project opened its ninth season with an extremely ambitious and lively program: five vocal pieces by four very different living composers, all from different generations, ranging from the edgy romantic irony of Andy Vores, in his late 40s, to the open-hearted tonality of Charles Fussell, in his mid 60s, and from the gorgeous Americana of Elliott Carter when he was under 40 (he’s now 95) to the harsh and granitic cacophony of 52-year-old George Rochberg (who’s now 86). What’s even more remarkable, each piece had a different — and notable — singer. There wasn’t a dull moment.

Vores is the most compelling of the generation of Boston-based composers after John Harbison, and he’s a striking text setter. The concert led off with the premiere of his Uncertainty Is Beautiful — a pungent, impassioned cycle about love that gave even Mary Oliver’s gushy, sentimental prose poems some bite, though the high point was the central section, a shimmering setting of Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s ironic and haunting poem refusing to accept the notion of "Love at First Sight" ("There were doorknobs and doorbells/where one touch had covered another/beforehand"). The vocal sections are punctuated by short orchestral movements, dissonant Marches and glinting "Shards," with their undercurrent of pizzicati, and a one-word ("Ah") Duo. Soprano Kendra Colton was at her very best, dedicating her radiant voice to the performance.

Carter’s lyrical 1940s settings of Whitman (Warble for Lilac Time, with what Carter called its "visionary rapture" fervently sung by tenor Frank Kelley) and Hart Crane (the voluptuous/ecstatic Voyages, eloquently sung by mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger), even with their later orchestrations, are hardly the forbidding Carter of the latter half of the 20th century, and they thoroughly capture the exuberance and richness of the poems. I don’t think Carter ever lost his gift for melody and instrumental color, though in the later work you have to listen harder for them. Then bass-baritone David Kravitz delivered the Hebrew text of Rochberg’s 1973 Sacred Song of Reconciliation with power and sensitivity, holding his own against the pounding percussion.

Baritone Sanford Sylvan sang the voice of Oscar Wilde in Fussell’s moving Wilde Symphony (its witty and affecting text by Will Graham) as if it had been written for him — which it was, back in 1990. This 40-minute work in three movements shows Wilde at the height of his celebrity — successful playwright, sexual predator, and devoted family man (with a wonderful re-creation, largely for solo trumpet, of an English music-hall song) — and in the depths of his fall, roaming France and Italy (orchestrally) after his prison term to a shadowy waltz, and finally on his death bed. Old-fashioned in its music, the piece holds up because it’s so skillfully worked out and its themes are so memorable. It’s also a great vehicle for the right baritone, and though Sylvan had to strain a bit for a couple of climactic high notes, he was otherwise in magnificent voice and made an extraordinarily sympathetic articulator of the text.

Throughout, Rose and the orchestra nailed every detail, in every style. And the substantial audience, which included a number of current and former BSO players, seemed thoroughly pleased. BMOP’s opening concert set a high bar for all the contemporary-music events this season.