E-Mail This Article to a Friend The seventh veil Karita Mattila’s BSO Salome, Boston Lyric Opera’s L’Italiana in Algeri, and the Cantata Singers’ Szenen aus Goethes Faust BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

World-class opera has finally returned to Boston, though not in an opera house and with no costumes, scenery, or stage action. Just megawatt star power of sizzling intensity and musicmaking of the highest order. New BSO maestro James Levine has better connections in the opera world than any other musician alive, and he’s been drawing on them. This past week, he brought to Symphony Hall soprano Karita Mattila in the role that had critics and audiences of the Metropolitan Opera groping for superlatives last year when she played Salome, the heroine of Richard Strauss’s decadent 1905 opera — based on Oscar Wilde’s French play — where the daughter of Herodias, in return for dancing for her besotted stepfather, Herod, demands the head of John the Baptist. By the end of her Dance of the Seven Veils, the tall blonde Finnish beauty was evidently wearing nothing but her libido.

In Boston, she wore a very low cut vermilion gown with ruffles and a huge slit up one side and near-invisible spike-heeled sandals. She was a spoiled princess, stamping her foot because she couldn’t have her way with the holy man, frustrated to the point of erotic dementia. "Ich will ihn jetzt küssen deinen Mund, Jochanaan" ("I will kiss your mouth now, Jochanaan"), she emphasized, addressing his severed head, pushing her hands closer together as if she were holding that head, or squeezing the very life out of the music itself. By turns angry, petulant, bitterly ironic, vengeful, proudly contemptuous, and lasciviously or tenderly lyrical, then utterly crazed, she was both a desperately infatuated young woman and a terrifying, electrifying monster.

In a live, unamplified performance, only a soprano with a gigantic voice could be consistently audible over the 100-plus musicians in Strauss’s orchestra and survive his no-holds-barred orchestration, which is even louder on a concert stage than buried in the pit of an opera house. Mattila’s gleaming soprano is as focused, rounded, and moist as the tip of an expensive roller ballpoint, beautiful to hear though less than ideally laser-like for cutting through. You could read on her face the subtlety of response to the words that the spectacular orchestral playing, even given Levine’s dynamic shadings, occasionally obliterated. (By the second performance, both she and Levine had figured out how to make her voice reach into the hall more effectively.)

Mattila began slightly earlier than the text printed in the program, a better set-up (or warm-up) but sending some listeners shuffling pages looking for their place. After her final notes, her head thrown back in silent ecstasy, she fell into convulsions and dropped to one knee as the soldiers we couldn’t actually see crushed her with their shields. Most chilling of all, and most moving, was Salome’s final full understanding of what she had done and her acceptance of her own helplessness. "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death," she tells us. And "Love, they say," — Strauss underlining Wilde with a sickly chromaticism — "has a bitter taste."

The generous program (two hour and 17 minutes, the shortest so far of Levine’s subscription concerts) began with Strauss’s Oboe Concerto, a work he may have been inspired to write because young John de Lancie, the late oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, put the bee in his bonnet. De Lancie’s student, John Ferrillo, is now the BSO’s principal oboist (after spending 15 years in Levine’s Met Orchestra), and he gave a wide-eyed, open-hearted reading of the difficult solo part, which is so long-lined and sinuous, there’s hardly a place to breathe. Ferrillo not only spun out the lines with warm tenderness, he also made each line a rainbow of color. He dedicated the performance to his teacher. Dating from 1945, four years before Strauss died, the concerto is a kind of throwback to the elegant "18th-century" music of Der Rosenkavalier. More transparent than the roiling thick textures of Salome, it made an elegant introduction.

The evening ended with a masterpiece of the previous century: Schubert’s majestic and endearing Great Symphony in C, that irresistible flow of inspired melody, marching, and waltzing. This is a favorite of Levine’s, and he led an affectionate, spirited, knowing performance. (He opened his score only for the second movement.) I prefer the more spacious tempos of Klemperer and Furtwängler (especially in the heavenly third-movement trio) and the greater dynamic variety (the brasses seemed constantly pushing). More Vienna. More shadows. But if Levine’s phrasing was traditional rather than revelatory, the playing was energized and often beautiful: James Sommerville’s haunting opening horn call, the caressing cellos, the antiphonal pizzicati of the first and second violins, and Ferrillo’s oboe solos with those imperceptibly materializing attacks! Very liberating after Strauss’s Freudian nightmare. Even Mattila, sitting in the first balcony after intermission, and dressed now in inconspicuous hot pink, was part of the cheering crowd.