E-Mail This Article to a Friend Major and minor Dubravka Tomsic, Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Höll, Opera Boston’s La vie parisienne, Benjamin Zander’s Mahler, Ilana Davidson with Collage, and Janna Baty with the New England String Ensemble BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

I had to leave the Red Sox’ third and final divisional-series playoff game against the Angels before it was over to get to Symphony Hall for one of my favorite performers, pianist Dubravka Tomsic, who was back for a recital in the Bank of America Celebrity Series. The Sox had gone into the seventh inning with a 6-1 lead. Then Vladimir Guerrero’s grand slam off Mike Timlin tied the score.

In music, such a sudden turn of events would call for a shift from major key into minor. This alternation of major and minor — joy and heartbreak — was just what Tomsic focused on. She began with two Mozart sonatas — the relatively unfamiliar G-major, K.283, and the better known A-minor, K.310. The former starts with a lilting lullaby, but the transition to the following theme is darkly dramatic. The lovely slow movement starts like a Schubert song, but its middle is in the melancholy minor. In the last movement, there’s unclouded joy interrupted by another troubled section in the minor.

K.310 is more overtly tragic, beginning with a grimly urgent march. Tomsic played down the pathos by making this a powerful battle against the force of destiny. Four times in the slow movement, a single note gets repeated nine times — it’s one of the most poignant moments in a Mozart piano sonata. Is there any hope of getting out of this slough of despond? Tomsic made the middle section seem like the cry (a restrained cry — this is, after all, Mozart) of a soul in torment. She played the repeat of the opening section even more quietly. The last movement ought to be a release from tragedy — the tune is like some children’s song. But it’s in the minor key, which heightens the tension between the illusion of joy and Mozart’s refusal to let us have it. (He composed this sonata shortly after the death of his mother.) Tomsic showed us a vision of a happier place, or the longing for one, but it dissolved in the overwhelming sense of sadness.

After such stoic restraint and transparency, it was a shock to return from intermission to a completely different style of music: the technical bravura of Chopin’s rhapsodic, turbulent, heart-on-sleeve nostalgia and desolation. But it was apparent that for Tomsic, the four Scherzi were a kind of extension of the Mozart, a new way of dealing with the same human concerns. And these performances too were phenomenal: the way she never lost the musical line even when she surrounded it with the most elaborate decoration, the way she articulated each note even at the most hair-raising speeds, the way she connected the dynamics to the moment-to-moment emotional changes. She played the middle section of the B-minor Scherzo (three of the four are in a minor key) as if Chopin’s hymn of heavenly bliss — melody in the left hand, accompaniment in the right — were perceived through tears. The opening of the B-flat-minor alternated the rumbling of mysterious triplets with outbursts of terror. The glittering descending runs in the C-sharp-minor were like the floating downward of dissolving fireworks. Then finally, a happy ending: the elegant, stately E-major, with the most beautiful melody in the series, yearning and tender, effortless, plus a big finish.

There were four familiar encores: Chopin (a nocturne followed by two combined études), Villa-Lobos (the comic Policinelle, with its final scintillating glissando), and Tomsic’s inevitable, sublime Bach-Siloti prelude, just on this side of silence. For this momentary brush with eternity, it seemed that everyone had stopped breathing.

MUSICMAKING ON THIS LEVEL doesn’t come along very often, but it happened again only a few days later when mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai and her ex-husband, pianist Hartmut Höll, returned for a memorable evening of Mahler in Harvard’s Houghton Library Chamber Music series (this season taking place at the Harvard Epworth Church while the library is being renovated). It was a short but ambitious program: two complete song cycles — the early Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer") and the great cycle of Mahler’s full maturity, Kindertotenlieder ("Songs About the Death of Children") — followed by the half-hour-long "Der Abschied" ("The Farewell"), the finale of Mahler’s late six-movement song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth").

Many members of the audience had evidently been at the performance of Kindertotenlieder Shirai sang with Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic a year ago — the one during which, suffering both from a cold and the effects of an excessively air-conditioned dressing room, she seemed to have lost her voice and her concentration — both of which she regained for her final performance. This year, her voice was in full flower — and what a voice! Rounded high notes like a clarinet’s; rich reverberating low notes like a cello’s; spectrums of color all the way up and down the staff. And her profoundly expressive, empathetic face mirrored every vocal inflection.

Höll revealed his own genius as an accompanist even before Shirai started to sing. The keyboard can articulate the smallest musical phrase more crisply than a full orchestra can. The opening of the first Gesellen song, "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" ("When My Sweetheart Marries"), was all chirping and twittering, with animal noises coming at us from every direction. And when the singing began — suddenly slower, a lament — the two worlds, natural and human, seemed poles apart. Such a large part of these uncanny performances had to do with their constant alertness to shocking transitions and miraculous transformations.

In Kindertotenlieder, Mahler’s orchestra employs some of his most exquisite effects — the beauty of the writing for oboe and English horn, for instance, creates a piercing contrast to the pain of such grievous loss and its concomitant anger, denial, guilt, and despair and the delusion of false consolation. The piano writing, harsher and more melodramatic, embodies this tension between beauty and pain less fully, despite Höll’s astonishing musicianship. Here Shirai’s voice held sway.

"Der Abschied," which sets two Chinese poems, was overwhelming in its trancelike intensity. Mahler’s piano version doesn’t try for orchestral coloration. His use of the pentatonic (Chinese) scale here is like an x-ray of a skeleton, the skull under the skin. Shirai and Höll, as if from opposite directions (word and wordless), captured the tingling ecstasy of life in the world, mortal beauty, and the diaphanous veil through which the singer passes into eternity: passes beyond nostalgia, beyond yearning, beyond resignation, beyond even acceptance, and into a state of bliss. Shirai seemed to be living through this passing, this ultimate transition, especially in her sudden full-voiced hymn to the beloved Earth followed by the final disappearing repetitions of the word "ewig" ("forever"). This was such a spellbinding, soul-stirring, bone-chilling experience, it made a friend of mine actually resent the encore, however heavenly: "Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft" ("I Breathed a Gentle Fragrance"), the first of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.